After Linda Long’s husband died of colon cancer last year, the phone calls poured in.
The 68-year-old retired office worker
says she got as many as 10 calls a day from a debt-collection firm
asking for $16,651.52 that her husband, Millard, had racked up on a Bank of America Corp. (BAC-News) credit card.
An employee at West Asset Management in Omaha, Neb., explained that
she wasn’t legally obliged to pay, according to a recording of the
November call reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Then he veered into a
discussion about how she could “get this taken off your plate.”
[More from WSJ.com: Be Tax-Smart in Year-End Donations]
Mrs. Long, of Cape Coral, Fla., told
the debt collector she had “lost everything.” She had sold the couple’s
motor home to help cover medical bills and funeral costs. All that was
left, she said, was $2,000 in life-insurance proceeds.
“I can give you that,” she said when asked for the money, “anything just to get this off of my head.”
When you die, your debts usually die
with you. Surviving family members rarely have a legal
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