When You’re So Financially Strained That You Consider Faking Your Own Death
A new book looks at the people who dream of—and sometimes succeed at—faking death and starting over.
I had a friend in grad school who told me that he didn’t worry about his debt because (he believed) it would all disappear when he died. He wasn’t planning to have children, so there would be no one for the debt collectors to hassle. All he had to do was make enough small payments to keep his creditors happy, and someday he and his unpaid debts would shuffle off this mortal coil together.
As Elizabeth Greenwood explains, there are a lot of people who share my friend’s sentiment—and many of them want to speed up the process.
“The only way to do it is at sea or to get blown up,” [Todd] told me. “You do it on a boat and find someone to witness it. First, I’d take out an insurance policy so I’d be gone but would know my kids could get a college education. I would arrange a sailing trip somewhere in Southeast Asia and make it seem like there had been a drowning. I’d head to Thailand because you can live in Thailand for nothing. I’ve traveled there, and I know how easy it would be. You don’t need anything, not even papers. I wouldn’t want to take any money with me, but I’d have some on the side, a few thousand. Now I’d have to make money, and I would do it online. I know I could make enough money to support myself under the radar — untraceable internet ad sales or something. It’d only make about ten thousand dollars, but I could live off that, just me, in Thailand, easy.”
Greenwood’s new book Playing Dead: A Journey Through the World of Death Fraud, releases August 9. Until then, we can read an excerpt at Vice—and meet Todd, the man who wants to fake drown himself so he can avoid his financial problems.
The thing about Todd is that his problems, by a lot of standards, seem pretty small. He’s unhappy with his job and he doesn’t like living outside of Silicon Valley. He has a long commute. He does not believe he will ever be able to retire. “Every penny goes to mortgage, family, bills. We will never be as comfortable as my wife wants.” This is not to say that a dissatisfying job and an income that doesn’t give you much breathing room can’t feel like huge problems, and Todd has an hour-long commute each way to dwell on them.
But instead of thinking about finding a different job or moving to a different part of the country, instead of considering divorce or therapy or anything that might help him move past his current unhappiness, Todd is thinking about faking his own death and starting over.
I kept expecting him to qualify his plan somehow, to say something like, “Of course, I would never actually go through with it because I love my daughters too much.” Sure, he’d accounted for them, mentioning the insurance policy that was to pay their college tuition. During our conversation, as the wind muffled his voice over the phone, as he drove by himself on a highway three thousand miles away, I kept waiting for the hesitation. But I didn’t hear any.
Read the whole excerpt, which includes not only Todd’s story but Greenwood’s own experience with the “what if I faked my own death to get out of paying my student loans?” fantasy.
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