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Comment by cdolan | Hacker News Reader

For those in the chat who react by saying “this should be law!”

Laws have unintended consequences.

Also I subscribe to a number of services I barely ever use, generally because I got in with an account very early on, and the price I’m paying is usually 1/5 or less of the current retail price. I do not want companies to proactively cancel my service.

“Thats Absurd!” You may say... well for about 10 years I kept my original AT&T unthrottled and unlimited plan goong on an iPhone, then iPad, until my credit card expired and the payment lapsed. Of course my account want instantly closed and my grandfathered plan unavailable.

Did I use more than 30 GB a month? No. Could i buy that plan again around 2017-2018? Nope. I was happy to secure that for $20/mo.

Do I want companies to have more red tape and penalties, such that they proactively shut down accounts from legacy plans? Absolutely not, get off my lawn.

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Planet money had a story where a similar superficially good idea ended up with Etrade selling a man's Amazon stock and deactivating his account after he didn't log in for a certain period of time. He was able to reclaim about $8000 for stock that would be worth ~$100k today.

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/799345159

This is mildly infuriating because the whole point of long term investing is to buy a stock, and well, do nothing -- besides hold it for decades. The stock should continue being held whether a user logs in or not.

> The stock should continue being held whether a user logs in or not.

FWIW ETrade agrees with this. It wasn't their policy that closed the account, it was a law that was in theory to protect consumers... from themselves?

Shouldn’t that have gone to the state’s Auditor & Controller’s Unclaimed Property dept? If you look at California’s Unclaimed Prop., you’ll see shares sitting in there. Heck, I have a few shares I need to claim.

Yes, but different states have different rules. Apparently in that guy's state, they won't take shares, only cash value of shares.

This could work for you, in the chance an investment didn't pan out and you're liquidated at the top. But for long periods of time, cash loses value to inflation. Seems off that states wouldn't accept shares. They're not as liquid as cash, but not far from it.

If I remember it did go to unclaimed property. The problem is that the stock today was worth much more than the selling price when they closed his account (and he intended it to be a long term holding).

Sounds like a lot of this could be fixed if the policy was to not sell the stock.

Perfect example. I forgot about this until now but I recall listening to this episode. Thank you!

For interested people. He didn't actually reclaim the $8000. Instead he is still fighting to get it's full potential worth.

My wife has an old gym membership for 24 hour fitness. She pays $120/year. Never uses it. Figures it's good "whoops, you're homeless" insurance - it's a place you can get dressed and take a shower.

Wow, that's one use of the gym card I never considered. Genious.

Not sure where it was, but I remember reading about someone saying, from experience, that when you are about to become homeless, signing up for a yearly gym membership is one of the best things to do (for this specific reason!).

I got one of those free personal trainer sessions at the gym once. In chatting with my personal trainer, I discovered that he lives in an RV outside the gym, and uses the gym to shower every morning and uses their bathroom so he doesn't have to spend money emptying/filling his tanks on his RV. A solar panel on the roof covered his electricity.

Basically by being employed by the gym and living in an RV he had no recurring expenses expect car insurance.

Are you in the Bay Area? Mountain View has a lot of people living in RVs, and I've seen RVs in the Walmart parking lot by the 24 Hour Fitness, there.

Yes. This was in Sunnyvale. There is a lot of RV living in Mt. View. For a while Google sanctioned living in an RV in their parking lot for their employees, but they seem to have clamped down on that.

The cops started to ticket people on El Camino too, but I think they stopped doing that during the lockdown.

If you've ever been to a 24 Hour Fitness, you quickly learn lots of people consider this use.

I personally stopped paying my previous gym membership because I was not going anymore, fuck year membership.

They emailed me a few times telling me I had to continue paying until the end of the membership, then called for a few months (never picked up), and now it's all gone.

Maybe my credit suffered, I have no idea, but I couldn't care less. I do not want to be a slave to this "credit score".

At one point in my life, we joked about this. All of us working at a startup were incredibly frugal, except for one thing: most of us paid for Equinox, and I paid for a trainer.

Figured we could just live in the office and shower at the gym. Actually think I could have pulled it off but I'd probably die alone.

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