Actor Michael Sheen has bought £1 million (C$1.86 million) of his neighbours’ debts and written them off using £100,000 (C$186,000) of his own money.
Sheen, best known for his roles in “The Queen,” “Frost/Nixon,” “Masters of Sex” and “Good Omens,” first embarked on his “debt heist” two years ago, with the twin aims of helping 900 people in his native South Wales and spotlighting the perils of a debt industry that demands sky-high interest rates on short-term loans.
“People’s debts get put into bundles and then debt-buying companies can buy those bundles and then they can sell it on to another debt-buying company at a lower price so … the people who own the debt can sell it for less and less money,” he explained in an interview on BBC TV’s “The One Show” last week.
“I was able to set up a company and for £100,000 of my own money, buy £1 million of debt because it had come down in value like that.”
This is wonderful… and made me wonder: how difficult would it be to set up a debt co-op? Buy debt at a loss and write it off of the income of people in the co-op, while erasing people’s debt at pennies on the dollar. Win-win situation!
It’s not hard apparently. John Oliver did it as a stunt during one of his episodes of Last Week Tonight.
John Oliver did that https://youtu.be/hxUAntt1z2c
Sadly, the more this happens, the more valuable the debt becomes, so you would increasingly be unable to buy it at such a large discount.
Yeah because few companies actually want to buy debt so the demand isn’t super high. If debt co-ops start up and begin to buy debt, those selling it will begin to sell it for higher prices. Not saying it won’t be cheaper than the original debt, but as soon as it starts getting purchased more frequently the market will adapt
I’d think a non-profit could do that pretty well. Set it up to take donations directly and have all donations be tax deductible.
Setup a co-op for fair loans outside of the criminal banking norms
I was thinking “how can I buy off my own debt and write it off?”. Your idea is better.
You can do that, if you have enough time to search for your debt.
I think one big issue is much of the cheap debt is loans people have defaulted on. So you have to stop paying the debt, hope for minimal ramifications before it hits the open market, then buy it back up at a discount, assuming you have the funds laying around to afford the discounted rate.
Loans backed by property (e.g., home, car) which can be repossessed tend to not be as heavily discounted. So its really just if you have massive credit card, student loan, or medical debt, and are willing to put up with harassment from debt collectors on the hope that it’ll be bundled into something worth less than your individual debt
Churches commonly do this in the US with medical debt. I think there’s also a website where you can donate towards that.
Interesting. Are the original debtors notified when that happens or does the ruse continue unimpeded?
Typically when you buy debt, you get a spreadsheet with contact details, so they’ll just send a letter. Even if they don’t receive the letter (because they moved or whatever), they’ll eventually find out because they don’t get calls from debt collectors and it gets removed from the credit report.
That makes sense.