Not the Answer to any Question I can think of

This ad by the bottom-feeding, soulless scum buckets who prey on the most desperate among us opens like a trailer to a really, really bad movie-- but instead of "she thought she had lost her true love" or something equally cliche'd and treacly, we get a message about how getting over your head in debt can...

1. Cause bouts of uncontrollable...crying? Vomiting? Laughing? I really don't know what the woman sitting on the stairs is doing. Perhaps because I watched this commercial without sound. Perhaps because I wasn't paying all that much attention, which will tick off some people who take this blog WAYYYY too seriously, I'm not naming names here.

2. Subject you to scary middle-aged guys in dress shirts "harassing" you by (gasp) calling you at home and work and knocking on your door with intimidating questions like "when do you plan to repay that money you borrowed?" You know, super-abusive, threatening stuff like that, which "threatens the security of your family." Except that, by law, one phone call to each creditor will stop them from calling you at home or work, or coming to your home. Not that any of these Debt Consolidation predators will ever tell you this- nope, if you are two days late on your VISA payment, expect Rocco and his brass knuckles to show up at your doorstep in a very foul mood.

However, signing up for the offered "service" can lead to

1. Tranquil moments with one's laptop, sitting on a beach while (presumably) making your "one easy monthly payment" and giving yourself a "YES!" fist pump as you pretend that you made something resembling a sound financial decision when you hired these bums to do what you could have done yourself, for FREE

2. Watching your savings "grow" quarter by quarter in a huge pink piggy bank....actually, I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. Because I didn't pay close enough attention, because again, I don't take this blog seriously enough.

Sigh. Look, as everyone with half a brain realizes, all companies like "Credit Answers" do (besides buy roughly 90 percent of the ad time on XM/Sirius) is get people to add to their debt by either

A. Hiring them to do "complicated" things like call the creditors and make offers-- again, something the debtor can do all by themselves, just as well, for FREE, while acting as "friendly banker" to the debtor by collecting monthly deposits to build a settlement payment-- paying themselves first, of course, or

B. Offering people who are already in trouble yet ANOTHER high-interest loan to replace the multiple creditors they have now. Is "one easy payment" really better than several monthly payments? Almost never. Why not? Ask the operator about a little something, hardly worth mentioning really, called the "fund transfer fee." Then ask how on Earth any credit company can justify charging hundreds of dollars to push a button and send money that you are already going to pay a high interest rate on into your bank account.

(The answer is, of course, "because we can.")

Most of the time, I blog about commercials that just irritate me. Sometimes, I blog about commercials because I think they insult the intelligence of the viewer, or fail to put a good face on the product being offered for sale. In this case, I'm blogging because I'm just plain angry. It's one thing to pitch junk food or cell phones to people who have money to be foolish with. It's another thing entirely to offer an anvil disguised as a life raft to a drowning person. The amoral jackasses who target the desperate with these ads really need to be slapped down, hard, by truth in advertising laws.