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>It took years to shed some of the residual behaviours, even after I started earning decent money. Despite having savings and reliable income I would still let bills run until they were overdue.

You wouldn't believe how many "wealthy" people do the exact same thing including not paying their subcontractors etc. My dad used to do electric installations in new built homes. Usually the larger the house and the wealthier the owner more excuses there would be when the time to pay came.Some of those "clients" took 2 years to get money out of them. Doing that to a small contractor you owe is pretty bad behaviour, but at the same time I can understand prioritising your outgoings if you have let's say an annual gas bill review and you know they'll not come after you until you're 3 months late. In such situation paying 89 days late is perfectly reasonable. Nothing bad about it.

I've found the richer people are the less they understand the need for the timely supply of money.

I have extended family that have this problem with their supply of trades. Very keen to get the work done, but paying the bill is somehow not important enough to prioritise.

Worst clients I've ever dealt with were wealthy individuals who didn't delegate or have a board to hold them accountable.

> In such situation paying 89 days late is perfectly reasonable. Nothing bad about it.

huh? What about the contract you agreed to when you took on the service that says you'd pay within 30 days (or whatever). I really don't understand the logic that says as long as you're willing to accept the consequences, it's ok/moral. It's one thing to have extenuating circumstances that force someone to choose between two bad choices, but to say that there's nothing bad about ignoring the due date on your bills just doesn't make sense.

Which direction the playing field is tilted makes a big difference.

> It's one thing to have extenuating circumstances that force someone to choose between two bad choices,

I think that is what was meant by 'prioritizing outgoings'.

I agree with you.

But, the terms of the contract are the terms. Pay late, pay a fee, or not, they’re still abiding by the terms. If we want different behavior, we need to make those desires known.

Not sure what part of my statement you're agreeing with, as the two points seem contradictory :)

The fees and penalties at 60 and 90 days that are common in contract terms like we're talking about are there for when the client doesn't pay by the agreed 30 day term, aren't they? 30 days payment is the behavior that the company wants, pretty clearly. Yes, they're also agreeing to limited penalties if they don't meet the original terms, but those penalties don't apply until they've not meet the terms they agreed to (pay in 30 days). It's not a sliding interest rate scale - it's limited penalties (likely as a result of consumer protection efforts over time). Yes, of course paying by 89 days is handled in the contract. Likely so are additional penalties/repercussions for payment after 90 days too (ie the debt will be sent to a collection agency at 120 days), but that doesn't make paying on those terms 'okay', because they were covered in the contract.

I'm calling out the idea that there's nothing bad (immoral/unjust) going on if someone doesn't pay within the ordinary term expected unless it's been explicitly agreed to otherwise (not as a penalty, but as an acceptable payment schedule), aside from other moral arguments about extenuating circumstances, etc that might mitigate the responsibility for payment.

> I'm calling out the idea that there's nothing bad (immoral/unjust) going on if someone doesn't pay within the ordinary term expected unless it's been explicitly agreed to

When I first founded my startup, I was vigilant about paying all of my contractors and vendors perfectly on time or early. As a business owner, I wanted to provide a great product and didn't want to chase people for money, and tried treating companies and people I worked with similarly.

What nice thought, and so utterly silly.

My company was largely geared towards large enterprises. When I started, I naively assumed that our relatively small fees, with easily cancelable month-to-month terms, would be so easy to stomach that these large enterprises would pay without issue if they found value, and would simply cancel if they did not.

But I found that the bigger the company, the more difficult it is to get them to pay anything. Big companies are more likely to wait until the day to pay, pay late and ask forgiveness, pay late and then ask for a discount to continue the service, or drag on a free trial as long as they can. These companies negotiate harder, spend more time going over insignificant line items, and generally create far more friction than much smaller companies.

I've had a relatively small $10k/year deals with big companies, where multiple attorneys negotiated agreements and haggled over price, their fees earning them multiples of the total contract value. Pushing folks to the limit, using disproportionate force, begging for leniency, and just generally playing dirty is the norm for large companies. Assuming morality plays any part in it is laughable.

Right, but all of that behavior by those people is immoral/wrong/bad. I said nothing about whether moral behavior should be expected at all times (or any time) from large companies or frankly most of the people we do business with.

I'm trying to point out that people who think there's nothing bad about it (as the original post I replied to stated) are completely missing something about the basic definitions of bad behavior. It's like some shared delusion or psychopathy that people seem to believe, because it's in their self-interest to believe it.

> It's like some shared delusion or psychopathy that people seem to believe, because it's in their self-interest to believe it.

A business is not an individual, it's a collection of individuals each doing a specialized task that collectively make up a large system. Applying moral principles that are generally applied to individuals to organizations just doesn't work. There needs to be a different set or prioritization of moral principles to be effective in a large organization or system.

In my example (highly paid attorneys spending inordinate amounts of time negotiating a tiny contract), the attorneys themselves were not bad, they were instructed to zealously negotiate every contract. The finance folks that paid late are not bad, they were charged with keeping high cash reserves and to tolerate a certain level of legal risk.

As a straightforward example for reducing out-right fraud: Most individuals already know that fraud, lying and cheating is bad. If an individual scams someone, they are bad. In contrast, for a business to be "moral", it must routinely audit their work processes to make sure that fraud cannot accidentally occur, and also provide safeguards when "bad" individuals do it intentionally. If there are no safeguards (regardless of whether fraud occurs or not), the company is "bad". Conversely, if stringent and proper safeguards are in place, and yet someone within the organization is nevertheless able to devilishly get around them and commit fraud, then it's possible that the business is still moral.

The point here is that individual morality is not the same as organizational or systems morality. Lots of moral people can come together and become an immoral organization. Similarly, a moral organization can withstand lots of bad people within their ranks.

That's an interesting look at it. I guess I still feel that the finance guys that are paying late are still doing something objectively bad, even if they've been instructed to do so. 'just doing my job' doesn't seem like a valid excuse from moral obligations (even if they weren't the ones who signed the contract). But I agree with the basic premise that you're making about the distinction between individual and organizational morality.

I personally prefer to think of organizations as being groups of people, each of which have moral obligations, and leaders have moral obligations to ensure that their organization as a whole (sum-of-parts) maintains moral behavior. So not so much the idea that the organization has some moral mandate, but the individual leaders. That view might fall apart in really large organizations; so I'm not sure.

Another twist is that large organizations (as clients in some theoretical exchange) might say : our payment terms will be 120 days, take it or leave it. That's bad on a different level (taking advantage of power imbalance), but if the vendor accepts the contract at that point I don't think one could point the finger at the payment behavior as being immoral in and of itself (assuming they keep to their stated terms). Some (many??) people would not put nearly as much moral weight on the act of using their power imbalance ("isn't that what competition is all about?") compared to the act of breaking their agreement, just because they can get away with it (another form of taking advantage of the power imbalance, but seemingly more sinister).

All that said, I'm just a dude in an armchair at his keyboard that finds this topic interesting, and willing to think about it a bit. I've never studied the philosophy of morality - although I guess I have a fairly strong internal sense of it for myself :)

The key question is whether fees are levied. If you can drag your feet for 89 days and pay not one extra cent, then why wouldn't you?

Because you agreed to pay it at a date before that? Because you don't want to be the person that's known for making things harder on others than they should be? Because not everything is about eeking every single penny you can from every single transaction?

That isn't how violators think about it though.

They either can't afford it right away so they stall, or they CAN afford it, it's just that everything else in their life takes priority over sitting down to pay the bill. Pure negligence.

Any experienced contractor should have a clause that charges interest after some point. You can be "nice" about it by reducing the interest rate or extending the deadline on the next job after the client has made clear they can pay on time.

Because the few dollars of interest you could make are not at all worth the hardship you place on someone who needs the principal.

You assume that wealthy people aren't sociopaths when it comes to the well-being of the people who work for them.

They are or they aren't, they don't become sociopaths in certain situations. My take is people accustomed to wealth from birth just don't understand how hard it can be.

I used to work with a guy who was very well off. I was not. I suggested something for a fee, he immediately tried to bargain with me. It was little money and I needed it; it was nothing to him. To him it was a game. He was no sociopath, he just didn't understand hardship. I saw him do that quite a bit. I'm sure if he ever felt a hard pinch himself he'd realise it wasn't a game, be much more sympathetic, but... that wasn't going to happen. Genuinely nice guy too.

Yeah, or if the extra fee is trivial, for that matter

Wealthy people who want to remain wealthy don't spend their money on massive houses though.

They may have high incomes, but if their outgoings are higher, they're still going to have problems.

Eh, not really. If someone has $20m they can easily afford a $5m house, which may not be “massive” in the Bay Area but is basically anywhere else.

It’s not even about income so much as not caring. Put yourself in the position of a very wealthy person, unless you are wealthy enough to have personal staff, what do you care about a $10k bill? It’s not a big deal to you and barely worth thinking about, you could easily just forget about paying it and think if it’s really important to pay in a timely manner someone will hound you and you’ll pay it then. You open the mail, see some bill notice, throw it on the kitchen table and hit the golf course.

How do they get the $20m to start with?

If they're earning $1m/pa but spending $1.1m they may look outwardly wealthy, but aren't really. Contrast that with the person who also earns $1m/pa but only spends $500k. They're the wealthy ones, and also probably the ones with the smaller house, cheaper car, and $20m in the bank.

If you 'just forget' about bills, that suggests to me a personality that is worse with money rather than better, ie the type of person likely to spend on material goods rather than spending wealth.

Book recommendation: The Millionaire Next Door.

And as a young person in your early 20's this is all bad enough, but I am going to read into it a little more and infer you were single. Now imagine if you had children to feed, the additional stress and additional expense probably would have broke you (financially, which happened anyway, and mentally). Not to mention knowing the effect of all this stress on your children and their developing minds.

This study is an odd way of looking at what is already established and known...instability has a detrimental cognitive and psychological effect on people, in particular children, but its not limited to children and extends to people with fully developed brains.

>Not to mention knowing the effect of all this stress on your children and their developing minds.

I believe Gabor Mate talks in depth on this particular topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9B5mYfBPlY is one interview, which references https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/129/2/e460?ss...

Yeah I used to do legal work in dependency court (abuse, abandonment and neglect of children), and so I have read countless psychological report...traumas are bad enough (so bad I had to leave that area of the law behind) but instability essentially guarantees the persons mind will never recover. Its like the Mohammad Ali quote, its not the mountain ahead that wears you out, its the pebble in your shoe.

I sill get anxiety at looking at my bank account, even though it hasn't been at 2 figures for years - I'm still fighting that dread of having to go "how am I going to pay for rent" even though I now own a home.

Well, it would be understandable if you now have a mortgage.

> it wasn't altogether bad, just very very sporadic. When I think back on those years I had all kinds of bad behaviours that were not rational. For example, not paying bills because something more urgent might come up. Not looking at balances because it was easier to not know.

I never had unstable income (maybe wishing I had more), but I definitely had some degree of these specific bad behaviors.

I feel (financial) maturity is a big part of this; As a parent now, I'm being intentional on how my kids earn allowance and think about spending.

For example, not paying bills because something more urgent might come up

Nothing wrong with this behavior as long as you pay on the due date. Schedule automatic payments on the due date & you'll hang on to the cash as long as possible, and you also won't forget to make payments & incur fees.