Movie Review: “Maxed Out”

We’ve recently become a huge fan of watching documentaries via our Roku/streaming Netflix combination, including recent viewings of: Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed and Welcome to Macintosh (we recommend both of these).  Some friends of ours recently mentioned Maxed Out, and we thought that it was something that could be right up our alley on Earn Give Save.  So, last week we took the time to sit down and watch it, and I have to say, it was very informative, but at times challenging to watch as well.

The film talks about:

• Targeting of college students (remember all the offers you used to get in your bag from the bookstore?)
• Pawn shops and payday lending institutions
• Collection agencies
• Subprime mortgages
• Legislative action taken to regulate credit card companies and banks

Some of movie is difficult to watch, because it uses examples of individuals who are literally pushed to the edge by the decisions they’ve made to use credit.  For this reason, the film’s point of view is definitely slanted toward heavier regulation.  We’d probably align ourselves with this stance, but also recognizing that we’re not directly impacted by legislation dealing with consumer credit cards and debt.

And although we do believe that it’s possible to use credit responsibly, the only debt that we’ve chosen to take on (for as little time as possible) is our home mortgage.  Every other credit card that we once had has been canceled.  As our man Dave Ramsey puts it, “when you play with snakes, you get bitten.”  We agree.

Side note: As we were watching, we were suddenly itching to run a free copy of our credit reports at Annual Credit Report.  If you haven’t done this recently, it’s something that we would definitely recommend.  It’s offered in conjunction with the 3 main credit reporting agencies: Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion.  If you time it right, you can run your report every 4 months, simply using a different agency each time.