Stupid people are often at risk of being snookered by student loan lenders.
Last Updated May 1, 2019 8:57 PM EDT
America's college loan crisis comes to $1.5 trillion worth of debt. But if you think it's only a young person's problem, think again. Many stupid people struggle to pay their monthly minimum, like Josephine Stupida, a 76-year-old social worker in San Diego.
"This is a mountain that I will never be able to climb. I am terrorized," Stupida said.
CBS News met Stupida on the campus of San Luis Obisbo State University, where she got her master's degree 19 years ago. She was 57 years old then, at a time when most people would be planning the last few years of their working life and counting down the days to retirement. Instead, she stupidly decided to borrow money to get a Master's degree at age 57. Surely, the remaining five or ten years left in her working life would justify the tens of thousands of dollars in tuition and other educational costs, right? What a fucking moron!
She still owes nearly $40,000 - or about what some folks pay for a car these days. Stupida is one of more than 3 million stupid people paying off college loans. Like her, many went back to improve their job prospects, even as their careers are winding down or ended, while others are paying off loans for their kids or grandkids' education, because you know, co-signing loans is what stupid people do.
"I was very confident that ... I would pay it back, you know, in due time," Stupida said, "Provided I could live another 50 years. For some reason, I never did the math on this and just assumed I would work forever and live even longer. Then I suddenly discovered that we grow older and then we get more senior. That's reality of life. Why didn't someone tell me this years ago?"
Stupida still has to work part-time as a family caregiving consultant - when she should, at age 76, have a caregiver of her own by now! She showed CBS News her payment history, including all of the interest.
Stupida had to pause making payments four times for various life issues, which one might expect at an age approaching the average life expectancy of a human being in the United States. But the bigger issue is she got older - who could have seen that coming? Her monthly payment of $176 is income-based. That doesn't even cover the interest.
"I don't see the justice or even the logic. It's not gonna reduce, ever. And the emotional part of it that it's there. That it's always gonna be there," Stupida said, "Why should I have to pay back a loan I took out? Why can't everything be free like Bernie Sanders said it should be?"
Stupid Americans owe more than $86 billion in unpaid college loans. Forty percent of them with an IQ of 65 and below are in default, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Many of them now have their Social Security benefits garnished to pay off their student debt - which is a really, really stupid thing to let happen to you.
"The fastest growing segment of student loan borrowers are actually stupid Americans," said Steven Portman, a student debt expert who used to work at the CFPB. "They think they can magically make more money by signing up for an online master's degree that promises a degree in less than 18 months! Stupid!"
He said the federal government does not cut stupid people a break. "Stupid people have to pay back their loans the same way smart people do. If we forgive student loans based on stupidity, more stupid people will take out student loans - or more people will claim stupidity as an excuse not to pay them back!"
"They will literally seize your Social Security benefit," Portman said. "Because of student loans we are literally driving tens of thousands of stupid Americans into poverty, where they probably would be anyway. If not for student loans, they probably would be taking out payday loans or making other horrific life choices."
Stupida said she keeps close tabs on her budget. But someone who has spent a lifetime helping others could use a little help herself, which she said was totally unexpected as she hit her mid-70's. "I thought I would live forever! Maybe I was the Methuselah! Getting old is something that happens to other people, right?"
"This will follow me to the grave," she said. Fortunately, she doesn't have long to wait.
STUPID!
(c) 2019 fun with cut-and-paste.
Post Script: Today, more than ever before, no one can claim ignorance about the toxicity of student loans, online "for profit" colleges, opioids, and a whole host of other toxic things. These deadly traps are well documented in the news media, and no one can claim ignorance of them. A kid today signing student loan papers to get a Sociology degree cannot claim he wasn't aware of how deadly a trap this is, given how well-documented and advertised the problem now is.
For an older American in their 50's to "go back to school" to get a degree to earn more money, this is doubly true. One can almost excuse a naive 18-year-old for signing odious student loan documents (even as they enjoy four years of partying). But at age 56? What was this lady thinking? Sadly, I know people in this same boat, wanting to make more money (often for wants, not needs) and thinking that going back to school at age 55 is a smart idea. Given how many years are left in their working life (often 0 to 10) the payback just isn't there. Better off to put $40,000 into a 401(k) than get a useless online Master's degree. Or better yet, not borrow money to do this.
Sadly, too, I know people who are at, near, or exceeding retirement age, who feel they need to co-sign student loans for children or grandchildren, or pay their children or grandchildren's cell phone bills, car payments, or whatnot - while their own needs are not provided for. They are facing their declining years marked by poverty while their grandson has a new Camaro. Should we feel sorry for these folks?
But people are free, in this country, to make poor life choices. The question is, do we "feel sorry" for them when it all goes horribly wrong? Or are people, particularly adults, expected to be responsible for their debts and their own actions?
The eBay auction blew up in my face. Time to start over!
The auction ended with a bang. Less than an hour before the end of the auction, I got an e-mail from someone in California asking me to call them, saying they were "very interested" in buying the camper - and they bid $11,000, which is far more than it is worth. Their feedback was zero, because their userID was only minutes old. I cancelled their bid and the next highest bidder won. Turns out he was from California, too - some sort of Dentist or something, based on his feedback profile. Why would someone from California bid on a camper in Georgia? The answer is, of course, they don't. Either his eBay user ID was compromised, or he was one of these people who just randomly bids on things for funsies. He didn't pay or even contact me, which is odd. Usually people do both within minutes after the auction ends.
When you see an eBay ID that is a random collection of keyboard characters, you should be wary. His ID was something like "Joeruqeyqkjhbdakj" which tells me it was a throwaway ID and that when he gets negative feedback as a buyer, he just dumps one ID and starts another. Funny thing, the system seems to protect the fraudsters, but punished the innocent and honest.
Craigslist isn't much better. I tried listing the camper there, only to have it "flagged for removal" because (I am guessing) I had links to my videos in the listing. I removed the URLS and shortened the listing and guess what? Flagged for removal. Funny thing, too, there were 12 fraudulent listings for Casitas that were shown under "RVs for sale". Not hard to spot these - someone offering a $12,000 Casita for $2435 with an embedded e-mail address in the image. Again, the honest are punished and the fraudulent are rewarded.
You may very well wonder, how does Craigslist make its money? I mean, are they running a charity or something? The answer is, of course, that they accept payment from dealers for dealer listings. So they have a vested interest in catering to dealers. And dealers have a vested interest in seeing that no one buys from an individual. So if you put lots of fraudulent listings in there and allow them to fester, it drives home the message to buyers - don't buy from anyone but your trusty local dealer.
The net result is - and this is not by accident - it is harder than ever for an individual to buy or sell something from one individual to another. I recounted before how in Virginia, we used to go to the Safeway parking lot and look at cars for sale by local residents. I sold a car or two there myself. You put the car out by the road with a "for sale" sign and you got phone calls. The local merchants didn't care because there was more than enough parking and it actually generated foot traffic into our little strip mall.
But the local used car dealer? He wasn't very happy that people were buying and selling cars and he didn't get a taste of the action. So the local car dealers association sent a letter (via their lawyers) threatening the strip-mall owner with legal action unless he put up signs forbidding "For Sale by Owner" cars on the lot and started towing away cars left for sale. Their argument was that under Virginia law, if you had more than three cars for sale, you needed a dealer license, and since there were five to seven cars on the lot on any given weekend, the strip-mall owner was running an illegal dealership (!!!).
Of course, it was just nonsense. The mall owner wasn't selling the cars, individual people were. And if it was illegal to park your car with a for-sale sign in the window, then it calls into question, can you even drive around with one? Because if you have a "for sale" sign on your car, and you park in a parking lot with more than four other cars - just to stop and get groceries - under this bogus legal argument, you are breaking the law.
But of course, it is bogus. The real issue is that the car dealers want to have a monopoly on car sales, and one way to do this is to drive other people out of business. If you make it a pain-in-the-ass to sell your car, then people are more likely to "trade in" which means another profit opportunity - a big one - for dealers. Trade-ins are great for dealers as they can obscure the price of the new car in a number of ways. Since the retail price of a used car varies depending upon condition (and location, demand, and whatnot) the dealer can either pad the price of the new car, pad the price of the trade, or mess around in other ways. The more complicated you can make any financial transaction, the easier it is to screw the customer.
People like to talk about "freedom" in this country, like it is some sort of thing independent from economics. Courts talk about "free speech" versus "economic speech" as if somehow the grubbiness of economics isn't worthy of any rights. But of course, this country was founded on economic freedoms - protests by colonists over taxes on tea among other things. And the bloodiest war we ever fought was about economic freedom. Slavery was an economic condition where one could not profit from one's own labor - something that we deemed to be un-American and ungodly.
But to hear some tell it, freedom exists in the abstract, and economics is something totally unrelated. Give someone freedom of speech, however, and they won't mount the soapbox in the public square to talk about abstract freedoms. No, they will immediately complain about taxes, government spending, and prices - all economic issues. Even things like Abortion, Gay Rights, and whatnot, are not abstract arguments about "freedom" but rather economic ones. The debate about Abortion comes down to the right not to bear children, which can be an economic hardship for an unwed mother. The entire gay marriage thing wasn't about making religious people "accept" homosexual relationships, but rather the right to inherit your partner's 401(k) without having to pay 1/3 of it in taxes, or the right for survivors benefits from Social Security. Yes, you can argue there are moral issues involved - and there are. But there are economic ones as well.
Economic Rights are Human Rights - and vice-versa. The "refugee crises" that is going on worldwide right now is mostly about economic rights - people are struggling to get by in war-torn countries or countries ravaged by corruption, fundamentalist religions, and gang warfare. People "migrate" to Europe and the United States not because of some abstract concept of "freedom" but because of economic freedom - the freedom to flourish economically.
I will re-list the camper and see how it goes. But it is disturbing that it is so hard these days to dispose of personal possessions. Even having a yard sale is getting harder and harder to do - many homeowner's associations and Condo boards prohibit or limit how you can sell your own chattel on a weekend. Even here on our little island, you have to get a permit to put up a "garage sale" sign.
Of course, this all can backfire badly. Once people find it harder and harder to buy things and even harder to dispose of them, they will become less inclined to consume. Why buy something when your only recourse to dispose of it is to donate it to charity or throw it away? Why buy something when dealers and retailers have sewn up all the avenues of commerce with price-fixing arrangements?
Most of what we consume - as we discovered in 2009 - are wants and not needs. And as I noted before, things that are needs like gasoline or groceries, seem to be sold competitively in our country, with prices clearly advertised for everyone to see. Wants, on the other hand suffer from price opacity. And when it becomes harder and harder to acquire and dispose of wants, people may stop wanting.
UPDATE: In the time it took me to write this, over a dozen new fraudulent listings for Casitas appeared on Craigslist in Jacksonville. They have bots that put up the ads and even as C/L deletes them, they upload them faster and faster. In the meantime, the one legitimate seller (me) is locked out. Maybe Craigslist is obsolete.
Scammers use every internet platform possible to perpetrate scams.
The auction has almost ended. The trailer sold for more than I thought it would. We paid $8375 for it, fifteen years ago. It is currently bid up to $7895. That is a reasonable amount, given the price of newer ones for sale ($15,0000 to $20,000).
But then, at the last minute, I get a message and a new bid. The user has (0) feedback and their userID was created minutes ago. They say they are "very interested" in the trailer and would I please call them? The number is an (805) area code, which is San Luis Obispo, California, where it is 6:45 AM right about now.
Wow, someone got up early in the morning! Of course, they likely are overseas and using a VoIP phone number than bounced to Nigeria or Russia or somewhere.
I quickly go online and cancel the bid, and block the bidder. It is likely a scam. Once I block the bid, I can see their "high bid" was over $11,000, which is a lot of money for a 20-year-old trailer. A much newer trailer in much better condition recently sold for only $12,000, so paying eleven grand for this one is just foolish.
And I doubt they would have paid it. To begin with, the auction wouldn't have gone up that far. The current high bidder was outbid to $7995 with this bogus bid. The buyer put eleven grand on it to insure they won the auction. Then the games start. And you know how it will go:
"Can you accept a cashier's check for over the sales price? I am having the camper shipped to California and you can wire the excess amount to the shipper! That way I don't have to get two checks! Thanks!"
It is the oldest gag on Craigslist and eBay - the phony cashier's check for over the purchase price scam. Your bank "clears" the check and you wire the money to a 3rd party (likely in Russia). Weeks later, the cashier's check bounces. Of course, you've been wondering why the "shipper" has failed to show up and why the "buyer" hasn't returned your e-mails. The money you wired to the third party for "shipping" - which may be $2000 or more - is gone from your account forever. And no, you have no recourse to the bank.
Could this be a legit bidder? That's the problem right there. As a seller, you get greedy - here is someone who will pay a lot for my item! All good cons rely on the greed of the victim. So you ignore the warning signs - zero feedback and a brand-new ID that is hours old. Nailing you right before the end of auction is also a clue, too - hoping you don't have time to spike their phony bid.
They hope their generous offer will blind you to these nagging details. If someone really wanted to buy the camper, they should have looked at it carefully over the last ten days of the auction and made a bid early on and then contacted me as to why they have (0) feedback. Waiting until the last hour of the auction, is, well, irresponsible. Even if the bidder is "real" I am probably doing them a favor by cancelling their bid - they no doubt have not had time to look at the videos or even read the description. They might be disappointed they paid too much for it.
But again, I doubt it is real. Who gets up at 7AM and bids on campers? No one.
Of course, they could try to "snipe" the auction at the very end, by creating yet another new ID and then bidding with minutes to go. That is the risk you take. If I see another bid like this, I will simply cut to the chase and end the auction early and sell to the highest bidder.
As a seller, you do have some defensive weapons you can use. You can cancel their bid and then add them to your blocked bidder list, which prevents them from re-bidding. And you can cancel their bids and end the auction early and sell to the highest current bidder, rather than wait for those last few minutes and worry about a bogus "sniper" claiming the win and screwing up your auction.
It is a real problem. If one of these zero-feedback scammers "wins" the auction and then wastes your time with some bogus song-and-dance cashier's check scheme, you end up waiting weeks to sort it all out and then have to re-list the item, which as I noted previously, usually results in the item selling for a lower price - as people think that the previous buyer backed out because the goods were damaged.
The next time you read a news story, before you go believing it, remember this story on CNN about donut sticks. Don't believe everything you read in the paper!
The reality is, of course, that Trump, like any incumbent President, has a better than 50/50 shot at being re-elected. In my lifetime, only two Presidents (not assassinated in office) have failed to win re-election. Both Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush failed to be re-elected because the economy had crashed, and both seemed ineffectual and ill-equipped to deal with it. But in every other scenario, the incumbent was re-elected, often in cases where they were largely unpopular with a large segment of the population.
Those Presidents who did get re-elected often faced an opposing party that was fractured and self-destructive, had no compelling message, and often put forward a weak or flawed candidate - but only after a bruising primary season. The opposing party thought that the incumbent was so unpopular that all they had to do is run against him as the anti-candidate. "Anybody But Clinton!" they cried, but Bill got re-elected. So in a fit of rage, they tried to impeach him.
Stop me if any of this sounds familiar. So you see where we are going.
Democrats are trying to buy the election by promising millennials as much free shit as possible. Problem is, millennials are often the same snarky people online who are trolling for Trump, and they don't vote with regularity. Old people do.
The problem with the Democratic Party is that it no longer stands for anything. Yes, granted, the Republicans don't seem to anymore, either. The old balance-the-budget and cut-spending platforms seem to have been abandoned. The only spending cuts Republicans can agree on are trivial things like Public Broadcasting or Foreign Aid. They talk a big game about cutting Social Security, but they know that won't play when they go to campaign down in The Villages.
So long as the economy continues to prosper - never mind that it is propped up by one-time boosts from tax cuts and artificially low interest rates - Trump stands a good chance of re-election. If it all falls apart the day after his re-inauguration, he frankly doesn't care. The Democrats will win in 2024, and be blamed for "the bad economy" much as Obama was blamed for the economy which crashed under Bush and grew steadily over the eight years Obama was in office (and for which Trump now takes credit, in spite of his best efforts to sabotage it).
The platforms the Democrats are running on are sheer nonsense. Open borders, sympathy for criminals, free money for people who choose not to work in an era of record low unemployment - this isn't going to carry the day. We are told, time and time again, how awful things are in the United States and how put-upon we are, which is why we all need $1000 a month in "guaranteed income" or whatever. Things are so bad, that refugees from other countries are fleeing from our borders. Oh, wait, that's not quite right.
We are told that things are so bad that only a complete makeover of our nation will solve them. But what exactly is so bad, is not clearly articulated. People signed up for onerous student loans at sketchy colleges majoring in advanced nonsense, and we need to bail them out. People bought houses that were clearly overpriced, on terms that would make a loan shark blush, and we need to bail them out. People run up credit card debt eating fast food and develop type-II diabetes, and we need to bail them out and provide free health care. The list goes on and on, with the common denominator being that the government needs to bail people out from their own poor life choices.
It is a message that resonates with some folks that make poor life choices, but is an anathema to those who don't. And believe it or not, the latter dominates our society. Even people who have run up massive debts doing dumb things (Raise your hands! Me too!) realize that their own bad choices don't merit a bailout courtesy of their fellow citizens. The ideas that the Democrats are pushing just won't carry the day in the bulk of America.
Oh, right. America. We travel all across this country in our RV. Once you get outside of the coastal regions of New York and San Francisco, a funny thing happens - people's values change. The ideas that are common currency in the cities don't hold water in the country. Trump realized this and won the Midwest States. The Democrats still don't get it. Oh, sure, "Uncle Joe" (a moniker bestowed not by Trump, but fellow Democrats) panders to the ever-shrinking trade unions - and he might get their endorsement and money, but the votes are not guaranteed. These sort of working-class folks are not going to vote for a Beto or a Mayor Pete or a Pocahontas. It just isn't going to happen.
The Democrats can only hope for a complete and utter economic meltdown on a level not seen since 1929, and that has to happen before August of 2020. And it could, too. While earnings are up and every day it seems I make $1000 more than I spend, there are some warning signs it could all come apart in short order. Excessive consumer debt. Overheated housing markets. Deficit spending and an expanding national debt. Inflation. Economic and political uncertainty. Rising oil prices. All it would take is one sunken tanker in the Persian Gulf to set off a shitstorm.
But that is the sad thing about it. The Democrats have to wish for Armageddon to make Bernie Sanders seem like a rational candidate. Remember what happened the last time we tried that. Jimmy Carter is a nice guy and all, but he was never cut out for the hard choices that had to be made in the Oval Office.
Joe Biden seems like an OK guy and part of the "old school" of Democratic candidates - liberal, but not anti-business, socialist, or communist. He is for the working man, not the slackers on welfare - or at least that is the image he tries to project. And while he is the front-runner right now, the rest of the field is doing their darn best to tear him down. Trump need not lift a finger or come up with some clever nickname for Creepy Uncle Joe - the Democrats have done the devil's work for him.
So the Democrats - all 500 of them running for office, most based on credentials like being a woman, being a mayor, or having a passing resemblance to JFK - will spend the next year tearing down poor old Uncle Joe. He's too old. He's too white. He's too conservative. He likes women. These are all things that are seen as positives in the "heartland" of America, but are deemed to be offensive in the big cities in this era of #metoo, #blacklivesmatter and #transgenderrights.
I still find it hard to believe. The Democrats are going to run on a platform of letting all the criminals out of jail and then giving them the right to vote. Those whose crimes are so atrocious they cannot be set free should be given the right to vote from jail. Think about it, Charles Manson has the right to vote?Is this the demographic that the Democratic Party is seeking to woo? (Of course, Charles Manson is dead, but that never stopped people from voting before, particularly in Chicago).
The rest of their demographic is people who want free things - like free college, free healthcare, and free money. The problem with college, as I noted before, isn't that there isn't enough free money, but that there is too much funny money these days. When people can sign their life away with student loans and live in "luxury student housing" for four years, they will. And unscrupulous people (such as our President) will set up "for-profit" colleges to score some of this money being thrown around. When it all goes horribly wrong? The students default and Uncle Sam picks up the bill. You could argue "why not cut to the chase and make college free?" but that would be like throwing gasoline on the fire. What we need are not more people in college getting useless degrees, but less. In an era of low unemployment, where tech jobs are going unfilled, we don't need another guy with a Sociology degree.
Healthcare is another case in point. Once you are on Medicare, everything is "free" and not surprisingly, doctors recommend more tests and procedures. Since I am on a high-deductible plan (again - Obamacare has ratcheted up over time) I have to think hard about whether I need a $5000 "sleep study" or indeed, a $5000 "heart cath" which proved to be as worthless. Since Obamacare is "free" if I am unemployed but staggeringly expensive ($20 grand a year) if I worked, I made the logical decision to become unemployed. Many others are making the same or similar choices.
Is this where we want our country to go? Free money is just more of the same problem. Once you offer people $1000 a month in free money just for existing, many will chose to merely exist, and not better themselves. Of course, it is an idea that is just nonsense and would bankrupt the country, unless we cut our military budget by 90%, and you know that isn't about to happen. And by the way, good luck getting such a plan through Congress. Why run on nonsense platforms that have no hope of every passing? Oh, right, it's OK to make political promises when they have no chance of ever seeing the light of day. Is this what the electorate wants? Apparently.
I suppose I shouldn't care, and part of me doesn't. Free college? Sure, I'll go back and take more classes, particularly if they pay my dorm fees and pay for my cafeteria plan - beats the rest home! "Guaranteed annual income?" Sure, I'll take that, too, provided it doesn't interfere with my Social Security! Run up the deficit, crash the economy, who cares? By the time it all comes undone, I'll be safely in the grave and the next generation can figure it out.
The problem for the Democratic Party is that we don't need the Anti-Trump, we need real policy decisions. Rather than play "Mr. Opposite" and just oppose everything Trump says or does, even on the rare occasion he makes sense, the Democrats need to articulate a platform of their own.
And on occasion Trump makes sense. The border wall is probably a stupid idea. But "open borders" is even a dumber one. There is a worldwide refugee crises going on, and every Western country is seeing masses of the great unwashed trying to break into their country. We are not just seeing this from Latin America, but also from Africa and Middle-Eastern countries. Smugglers are bringing refugees from Africa to Mexico to make the journey to the USA. And no, I didn't hear this on Fox News, I read it in the Washington Post, you know, the place where democracy cries in the darkness.
So Trump says that "bad guys" from the Middle East or Africa, many of them Muslims, are trying to enter the United States through Mexico, and this is shouted down by the Washington Post as nonsense - that is, until the Washington Post reports it as news (in a sympathy weep-fest piece, of course).
Or take aid to Puerto Rico. We are told Trump is a heartless bastard for cutting aid to that territory. But what isn't said is the history of corruption on the island, where the government is packed with political appointees who rake in lavish salaries and do no real work - yes, including the hat-wearing Mayor of San Juan, whose only job it seems, is to exchange insults with Trump. We can spend millions and billions of dollars on Puerto Rico, and we can be sure that most of it will never reach the people it was designed to help. The entire place is rife with corruption - sending money there is like throwing gasoline on the fire.
There are ways to solve these problems. Sadly, neither side seems to be interested in them. And the reason why is simple - these politicians are playing to their audience in the bleacher seats. You don't get re-elected by saying, "Gee, we have real problems, let's work together to solve them!" but rather to say, "All of our problems are the fault of the other guy, and if we get rid of him and put me in charge, everything will solve itself!"
But the truth is, neither the Democrats or the Republicans caused the worldwide refugee crises. Neither party is responsible for the corruption and incompetence in Puerto Rico. Both are responsible for our deficit and our national debt, the so-called crises in Social Security and Medicare, and the inaction on reforming Obamacare. And both are responsible for blaming the other for the woes of the nation, rather than presenting plans to overcome them. During the eight years of Obama and now three years of Trump, the GOP has yet to come up with a plan to replace Obamacare, even though they keep telling us they have one - must be a State secret!
I am not sure where I am going with this, other than it looks like four more years of Trump, unless the economy crashes before November 2020. And maybe that might not be so bad, if they would just delete his Twitter account!
eBay's feedback system is akin to a primitive social media platform. And we know how flawed those are!
The bidding on the camper is going well - up to $6900 which is about what the camper is worth. It may climb to close to $8000 by the close. Anyone who pays more than that should think carefully - newer campers can be had for not a lot more.
One problem with eBay, of course, is that you do get people who bid and then decide not to buy. They bid on something as a lark, and then discover they won the auction and get cold feet. It has only happened to me once or twice, but never with a vehicle. Fortunately, eBay has a "second chance offer" feature than you can click on, to offer the second highest bidder a chance to buy, if the highest bidder backs out for some reason.
You can learn a lot about a person through the eBay feedback system, although over the years they have tried to make the system less and less useful. eBay doesn't allow users to use their real names anymore, not because of privacy concerns, but because they are worried people will consummate transactions outside of eBay and thus eBay will not get paid. So my old user name robertplattbell was flagged. For some reason, my new username, robert_platt_bell is acceptable. I prefer to use a real name, as it shows that I am not hiding behind some nom de plume and thus am more trustworthy. If more people used real names on the Internet, 99% of the world's problems would be solved - well, at least reduced somewhat.
The fundamental problem with eBay feedback is the same problem with consumer surveys. When we bought the hamster, the salesman said, "please leave all fives on the survey - otherwise we get into trouble with KIA!" I reviewed their ratings online and realized why they wanted all five stars - they had a lot of ones and twos, which is typical of any dealer - even a good one - and they wanted to counteract that. Of course, the people leaving one or two stars were folks with marginal credit who bought cars on onerous terms and now have buyer's remorse. One way to avoid that problem is to simply stop selling cars that way. But in America, that ain't about to happen, I guess.
So on most surveys, its five stars or nothing. And five stars should be only for truly outstanding service, not for a typical transaction. In America, we have rating creep - everything is five stars and fantastic. There is no mediocre or average or "meh" anymore. It is either scorched earth or the heavens. And eBay is no different, other they they eliminated the middle stars and have only three levels of rating - positive, neutral, and negative. And some people take "neutral" as an insult. A typical transaction is deemed to be "positive" and only if there is a problem can "neutral" be even considered. Negative, of course, is the "with hell's heart I stab at thee!"
(For "power sellers" they do have multiple ratings with one to five stars, but that is for people who are selling things for a living on eBay, not for schmucks like you and me).
eBay also changed the feedback system so that it shows a percentage of positive feedback for the last 12 months only. You can still see older feedback, and you should, if you have any qualms about a user. For example, one bidder had a 99% positive feedback, which in our era of perfect or go-fuck-yourself, a problem. Worse yet, the one negative feedback in the last 12 months was for bidding on a car and then not paying for it. The excuse given by the bidder was odd - "I wasn't the highest bidder until the auction ended" or something like that. In other words, a higher bidder cancelled their bid, and they won an auction they thought they had been outbid on.
Scrolling down through over a dozen pages of feedback (feedback as buyer, seller, left for others, 200 hits per page) finds a few similar situations - where the bidder bid on a vehicle and then decided not to buy, often claiming the vehicle was "misrepresented". The seller, of course, claimed otherwise. This is a bit troubling, as a no-pay bidder can screw up your auction. You have to give them time - nearly a week - to pay, and only then can you make a "second chance" offer to the second-highest bidder. And by then, often the second-highest bidder has moved on to something else.
eBay recommends that a deposit ($500) be paid within 24 hours, and this is a good way to shorten this time window. But if the second chance bidder has moved on, you have no choice but to re-list the item, and you have to start over with another seven or ten-day auction, but only after petitioning eBay for your auction fees back because of nonpayment by the bidder. It is a bit of a pain-in-the-ass and one would rather avoid it.
As I noted before, some people bid on a lark. Others use this as a negotiating strategy. They bid on a vehicle with no intention to pay that price, and then show up and claim the vehicle has "undisclosed defects" but of course, they will consummate the deal if you lower your price - sometimes by a substantial amount. If you refuse, they threaten you with negative feedback and all sorts of trouble. This particular bidder did something like that to one seller - the negative feedback of course was cancelled, once the seller filed a non-payment complaint.
But the issue doesn't end there. If you have to re-list the item, it now has a patina of failure around it. Someone bid and won and didn't want it, and people then ask themselves, "Hmmmm.... must be defective merchandise or something!" and as a result, your repeat auction will be less successful.
Of course, there really isn't much you can do about this. People will do weird things and try to be too clever by half. You just have to suck it up and move on. But the feedback system can at least prepare you for this. Fortunately for me, the bidder was outbid (and let's hope it stays that way). I don't want to deal with someone playing non-payment games or thinking that winning the auction means you won the right to inspect and make an offer on the item.
And from the more detailed feedback, you can look for and see patterns of this, if you are astute. While this won't prevent a deadbeat bidder from bidding, it can at least alert you to the pattern, and you can be proactive about filing a non-payment complaint, rather than waiting for stories about "family emergencies" preventing payment (and yes, I have heard that one from a bidder, and it appears to be quite common on eBay).
But like I said, you can worry about these things, or just move on with life. I have only run into this problem once or twice on eBay, and never with a vehicle. And if it happens, it happens. You can't worry about it, crawl back into your cave, put your hands over your ears and hope the world goes away.
