Priceless: debt which keeps taking

I saw the following story at a mailing list and had to blog on it:

Larry Wittkugle keeps getting dunned for an old Household Bank credit card that he paid off in 1996. Every so often, a different debt collector jars his retirement with a stern letter urging him to pay off the account again.

It seems that these old debt can come back to bite you, over and over:

Debt: the "gift" that keeps on taking

Or how about:

Selling old debt to collection firms: pennies on the dollar
Collecting on the old debt: multi-hundred percent profits [by the collection firms]
The ability to resell the debt to collectors, again and again: priceless

What's sad is that the Jews knew it well enough [or at least King Solomon] long time ago to put it succintly:

The rich rule over the poor,
and the borrower is servant to the lender.
Proverbs 22:7

To rephrase Santayana's famous saying using the ideas found in the introduction to Proverbs:

Those who cannot learn from the wisdom of the past are condemned to suffer the life of the foolish.

Copyright, 2006, DannyHSDad, All Rights Reserved.