A fter the dust settled on the collapse of the economy, on my family’s lives, we found ourselves in an impossible situation: we owed more each month than we could collectively pay. And so we wrote letters to Citibank’s mysterious PO box address in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, begging for help, letters that I doubt ever met a human being. The letters began to comprise a diary for my father in particular, a way to communicate a private anguish that he mostly bottled up, as if he was storing it for later. In one letter, addressed Dear Citi, he pleaded for a longer-term plan with lower monthly payments. We were not asking, in the end, for relief or forgiveness, but merely to pay them an amount we could still barely afford. This is an appeal to Citi asking you to work with us on this loan, he wrote to no one at all.
He described how my mother’s mounting medical bills, as well as Chase Bank’s collection on our foreclosed home, had forced the family into bankruptcy, which provided no protection in the case of private student loans
Finally, at the beginning of 2012, my father started writing to the office of Congressman Joseph Crowley, who represented the district in the Bronx where my parents had relocated. In one of these letters, he described watching Too Big to Fail, an HBO film about the financial crisis, which had come out several months earlier. (My parents lost every asset they had, but they still subscribed to HBO, which became more than TV for them a symbolic relic of their former class status.)
What made these exchanges more ridiculous was the fact that Citibank was in the process of retreating from the student loan market by selling off my debt to Discover Financial, who would give us the same response
The recession was over, officially anyway, and people who had not suffered its agonies were already profiting from its memory. Recession films often took place in the gleaming offices of hedge funds and investment banks, with attractive celebrities offering sympathetic portrayals of economists and bankers Zachary Quinto, in 2011’s Margin Call, for instance, plays a rocket scientist turned risk analyst with a heart of gold, a do-gooder who discovers that his employer has leveraged itself to the edge of bankruptcy. These films often depicted figures who experienced little to no repercussions for their roles in leading the country into a recession, who abused the misfortune of people like my parents payday loans in Rockport ME no credit check unmentionables who owed more on their houses than what they had paid for them and, of course, rarely featured in the story at all.
My father described himself and my mother to Crowley as the poster children for this entire financial event, by which he meant Americans who seemed to have done everything right on paper, but in doing so contributed to their own downfall. By the time he wrote to Crowley, my father was working again, but it had taken him two years to find another job, which paid him much less money. After his run of financial calamity, he knew better than to believe anything good would last. We are in our 60s and I figure when we get to our mid-70s life will become difficult again, he wrote.
Crowley’s office wrote back. It was the first time in about two years that a person had responded to our correspondence with encouragement, or something like it. Someone who worked for his office in Washington helped to arrange a conference call with government liaisons from Citigroup to discuss a different payment plan. The monthly payments to Citi were then more than $800 a month, and we were trying to talk them into letting us pay the loan over a longer period, at a rate of about $400 a month. These terms were reasonable enough, but the response to this request was like an automated message brought to life: We are precluded from a regulatory perspective from being able to do what you are asking, each of the representatives said. We were nothing to these companies but a number in a database. And they fully controlled our fates.