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Title: Maxed Out
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| CONSUMER ADVICE |
Parents, though there is a fair amount of bad language this is movie you should probably let your kids watch this anyway. Recommended for ages 10 and up. |
I've been the kind of person who doesn't always think too much about swiping a credit card to pay for something, but who is frugal when it comes to spending cash. While I'm certainly no credit card fiend, I only really use it for gas and the occasional concert ticket, I do admit that spending cash is harder because I can see the money trickling away. With a credit card, the money being sent is out of sight and out of mind. Ironically, I did swipe the stupid card to pay for an oil change today only to go home and watch "Maxed Out," the new documentary (though it feels more like a horror film) about credit card debt. Now before we continue I think we all acknowledge that credit cards are a necessary evil. You need good credit to get a car, house, all those things you need to live a "comfortable life" like you see in the movies.
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The problem is how much credit do you spend, do you way the pros and cons before you use that credit, and how early is too early to be getting credit in the first place? How does an eighteen year old college student with no job and no credit history wind up with twelve credit cards and $20,000 in debt before he's twenty-one? Maybe it has something to do with the credit card companies who use many selling techniques to get people signed up on these cards, and then convince people to not pay them off, until they are so deep into debt that they'll never escape. The boy eventually kills himself. A college girl with a similar problem also hangs herself after getting too much credit card debt. Their grieving mothers cry over these stories while they angrily tear up credit card offers to the dead kids these companies bankrupted in the first place.
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Could these kids have been more responsible? Most likely. However adults find themselves in the same situation as the kids do. All it takes is one emergency, one time where you need instant cash that you don't have on you to get a debt that could potentially cripple you for life. The situation gets worse when you discover that the credit card companies sell your debt to private companies and parties for money. Which basically means that these private companies pay Chase, Visa, and MasterCard lots of money to have control of YOUR debt, so they can basically take everything away from you! When questioned how this could happen, we learn that while the constitution gives people the right to privacy against the government, that luxury is not passed onto corporations.
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So bottom line, the companies could dig into your life without ever doing anything wrong. This is how the paparazzi gets away with printing private information about celebrities lives. One guy who is living a comfortable life style shares a story how when his wife left him with all his debt, filing for bankruptcy seemed like the only way out of it. People keep asking the government for help in getting out of debt, but when the government itself is saddled with it's own credit problems there seems to be little hope for the future. Credit card debt is a wild beast, one that is fed both with savvy business practices from the credit card companies and people's own problems with controlling their spending. The film has no answers for these problems because, quite frankly, there aren't any.
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Each problem is different, and each problem has it's own line of unappealing answers. Most of these answers do not help the consumer very much. When death is the only solution to getting out of debt, then we face a crisis that is well beyond a simple matter of who owes who money. People should be responsible for their spending habits but the credit card companies also need to be help accountable for how they collect money. They go beyond collecting what is theirs and destroy lives, and there appears to be no end in site. If the film has one major problem its that it gets on the Iraq war and government spending habits, which seems to be ripped from a completely different movie.
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Plus these swipes at President Bush are becoming tiresome seeing as how credit card debt has been an issue for years, and it's appalling that it STILL hasn't been touched upon seriously by any major president in years! After watching this movie I got online and paid off my credit card, and good riddance if I never have to use it again. This is one of the best films of the year.
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