Physical Foreclosures

BreastAugUSA, cosmetic surgery finance group, urges their clients to spend well beyond their means, exhorting them to compromise their retirement plans or ask an employer for a loan.  How entertaining to imagine convincing an employer that with just a little of his or her help you could go and get that new designer vagina that's all the rage.  Their policy is worth reprinting here:

CASH PAYMENT
Still, you may not have the means to make cash payment, or may have timing issues that make the cash unavailable when you want to have surgery. If financing makes more sense for you for these or any other reason, we offer a patient financing plan that makes it possible for you to have your cosmetic procedure today. The truth is cash payment is the best payment option for your cosmetic surgery.
Cosmetic surgery is like any product or service; you get the best price the market has to offer when you make payment in cash. Many of our customers who choose to pay cash acquire their funds through one or a combination of the following.

-- Withdrawal from savings or investment accounts.
-- Loan from 401K plan.
-- Loan from life insurance policy.
-- Loan from friend or relative.
-- Advance or loan from employer.
-- Tax refund.
-- Pre-surgery installment plan. Our doctors offer this option, which is similar to a lay-away plan.
-- Credit cards. Our doctors accept credit cards as cash payment. Often, our customers secure low interest rates by moving their balances to new cards that offer special rates for balance transfers.

THE PMG PATIENT FUNDING PLAN

The truth is you probably have three questions about financing. The answers depend on two factors: your credit profile and your lender's commitment to making loans.

1. Can I get approved?
We approve more applications than any lender in the business ... bar none.
The PMG Patient Funding Plan is committed to making loans. We don't rely on a computer scoring model to make decisions, but carefully investigate each application with the intent of granting an approval.

2. What will my monthly payment be?
Your monthly payment is a function of the amount you borrow, the interest rate, and the length of the loan.

-- We help you find the best price available on your procedure, so you don't borrow more than
-- you have to.
-- We offer extended loan terms, normally, 36 or 48 months.
-- While the interest rate is largely determined by your credit profile, we work to secure the
-- best rate available.

3. How much cash will I have to put down?
In most financing transactions, the lender asks you to make a cash investment in your purchase. The amount of your out of pocket cash requirement depends on your credit profile and is generally between 10% and 25%.

In the end, what’s most distressing about this is the predatory nature of these lending practices.  If BreastAugUSA is reviewing all applications with “intent to approve” and encouraging clients to raid retirement accounts, life insurance policies and the wallets of relatives, one wonders how much these practices differ from the practices of lenders who pushed so many people into home loans they could not afford.  These loans may be on a different scale, but with foreclosures rampant and our economy in such difficulty, they’re no more ethical.  When people default on home loans, they lose their homes.   When they default on body loans, should they lose those too?

That question is far too literal, of course.  But it needs to be asked because it gets at the bigger issue underlying all of this, which has to do with the location of the “self.”  So much of the language of cosmetic surgery advertising uses words for bodies and body parts interchangeably with words for the self ("new you," "better you," "the person you've always wanted to be," etc.), and in asking such a literal question, we're only extrapolating that rhetoric to its next step.  Loans for houses, cars, jewelry, etc. are guaranteed by using the items themselves as collateral.  Default on the loan, say goodbye to the item.  Default on the loan for your breasts, say goodbye to... the new you?