The Things You Carry

Voudoun Economics

Normally, I resent when someone makes some headlines for coming up with a snappy, headline-friendly term for something completely random - Gen Y, frienvy and, to be honest, anticonsumerism spring to mind. It’s sort of lazy journalism.

But who can resist Zombie Debt?

Yeah, I had to go with Thriller. It’s sort of prophetic in terms of how Michael Jackson looks now, huh?

Anyway, back to Zombie Debt (such a cool term). According to the Newsday Consumer Watch article linked to above, Zombie Debt is when bills from years ago rise from the dead in the form of debt collection agencies. Sometimes the people getting the bills just didn’t pay, sometimes they were victims of identity theft and didn’t know it.

The main thrust of the article is that it’s hard for people to deal with their existing consumer debt without major corporations selling off old bills to tenacious collection agencies at the rate of $100 billion a year.

Those agencies make all their money from collecting these bills, so they’re going to care a lot more about an unpaid $100 on a J.C. Penney charge card from 1993 than J.C. Penney does.

Random personal aside, I had a problem with this about a year or two ago. When I called to contest the gas card charge from 2001, I kept getting transferred to a call center in India. All the people there kept claiming they were in San Diego. I actually called the collection agency’s San Diego office and confirmed the call center people were in India, it pissed me off so much. They also kept giving me fake names - bad ones. I spoke to Rodney King a lot while trying to straighten out the bill. Spoke to Andrew Jackson too.

Here’s a link to a Google search on Zombie Debt. That way you can check out the Motley Fool article on Zombie Debt, the MSN Money article on it, etc. You’ve got a lot of choices. A snappy term for a pre-existing thing seems to spread around the journalistic world like, well, zombies.