Many people we work with write in to express their gratitude for the assistance we, at CRN, provided in helping them get out of debt. We decided to create a way for people to share their experiences with others by posting to this blog!
You are Invited…
…to share your story, feedback, and/or review of your experience working with Consumer Recovery Network in the comment section of this post.
There are no rules for posting. You may want to follow an outline of what brought you to CRN, how we compared to other options or companies you looked into, what happened along the way, and what the ultimate result of working with us has been, to date. Or, just have fun and express yourself!
ALSO:
Not everyone we consult with qualifies for our more aggressive approach to dealing with debt. Many of you we consult with still appreciate the time we take to inform you of what debt settlement really involves after having contacted other service providers. Our consults are often a refreshing dose of blunt honesty for people just looking for information and answers they can trust. You are invited to share too!
Tell you what….if you having anything to share about CRN, the Debt Bytes Blog, or any facet of the work we do…. chime in! We look forward to hearing from you!
P.S. You can identify yourself using your initials or first name only, unless you are comfortable sharing your identity, like Jonathan Grossman, who blogs about his experience with CRN at Debtsettlementstory.com
Having worked with consumers who are struggling with debt in one form or another for many years, I have always endeavored to compile informative resources geared towards a better educated consumer.
Most resources and professional assistance available to consumers are often ones that have a bias due to self promotion. Someone or some source that has something to sell you is generally going to tip the scale in their favor and is prone to “talking their book”.
In the debt relief industry, finding a reliable and affordable source of comprehensive information about all of your options that is unbiased and not motivated by selling you something is becoming increasingly difficult to find.
This post is about “talking someone else’s book”! In its seventh printing no less!
The #1 resource I could possibly recommend to a consumer struggling financially and who is concerned with being fully informed about all of their options to deal with crushing debt is “A Guide to Surviving Debt”. This book has critical information EVERY consumer will want to evaluate if they are struggling to find the best solution for themselves and their family in tough financial times.
This book will thoroughly deliver reliable information that you can use to determine your best path for getting out of debt, with no concern for whether the information is slanted toward a solution other than the one that is best suited for YOU.
Let me put it this way:
Get this book, read it cover to cover, and you will know more than most of the self proclaimed experts offering debt relief advice or products.
Surviving Debt tells consumers, their counselors, and lawyers what they need to know about:
Dealing with debt collectors
Which debts to pay first
Saving your home from foreclosure
Your credit report
Credit card debt
Student loans
When to refinance your car loan
Income tax collections
How to find effective credit counseling agencies
Special rights for military service members
Your bankruptcy rights
Much more.
“A Guide to Surviving Debt” is published and available from the National Consumer Law Center (NCLC). NCLC has a dedicated and successful history of championing consumer rights that spans decades!
If you are struggling financially or work with people who are, you owe it to yourself or those you work with to have reviewed this number one go to resource!
Today, the Detroit Free Press ran an article about how consumers have the option to negotiate a reduced balance pay off with creditors (debt settlement). Read the full article here: Debt Settlement in Michigan
I was interviewed by the reporter for the story as was a CRN member who was quoted in the article. The article gave some good advice, but I would like to expand on it.
The article correctly stated many companies “have taken outrageously high upfront fees — as much as 13% to 20% of your debt”. The average fee charged by most settlement companies is 15% of the debt you ask them to settle for you.
The CRN member quoted in the article settled $35,000.00 of debt for $12,000.00 by implementing the tools and following the guidance she received as a CRN member.
Had she hired a typical settlement company to settle her debt she would have paid an average of $5,250.00 in upfront fees. However, as the Detroit Free Press article stated, she paid CRN just $1,200.00 to do the same thing. Would it really have been the same thing though? Not hardly!
If you hire the typical settlement company you’ll find:
By paying high upfront fees before the company achieves any real substantive results for you, you are prolonging your success, and often dramatically reducing your odds of achieving any success at all.
The company will probably send notices to your creditors letting them know they are now working with you. This means the creditors will know that you are now paying a settlement company instead of them. Often, the reaction to this information will be to become more aggressive about collecting what you owe them, possibly by referring your account to a law firm in your area earlier than it would otherwise and giving the firm authorization to sue for the money you owe.
The settlement company will generally not be negotiating with your original creditors because they mostly wait for your accounts to charge off. Charge off usually happens at about 6 months of nonpayment. Once creditors charge off bad debt, they will typically do one of three things with your account, assign, sue or sell.
Settlements are still available when your account goes someplace other than with your original creditor after charge off, but depending on who your creditors are, you’ll save the most through debt settlement by negotiating with the original creditor before the account charges off. In other words, you could find yourself paying more, sometimes much more, when settling with a 3rd party.
The article in the Detroit Free Press seems to suggest that the CRN member was still hoping debt settlement would work for her by saying “She’s crossing her fingers that this arrangement works.” It did work. She enrolled with CRN in September of 2009 and completed her settlements in March 2010. She got out of debt in 6 months rather than the 3 to 5 years it would have taken her to resolve her debts if she had filed for chapter 13 bankruptcy instead or the average of 4 to 5 years if she had enrolled in a debt management plan.
CREDIT REPORTING
Debt settlement is an option for someone who can no longer continue making timely payments on their debts and who’s credit score is therefore either already suffering or soon will be.
What happened to the credit score of the CRN member quoted in the above linked article?
The CRN member gave me permission to share an excerpt from an email exchange I had with her on 3/22/10: “…Two days ago, I re-ran my credit and 3 of the 4 settlements had already posted. My credit was already 671-677 from each of the three bureaus! I think my credit ranged from 670-710 in the year prior to starting the settlement process so this is amazing.”
The effect of debt settlement on an individual’s credit score will differ based on several factors, so please do not take the experience of this CRN member as an indicator of what will happen to yours. The points here are: Getting out of debt should be your first priority, and once you do, your credit will bounce back regardless of the option you choose to get out of debt.
The US economic engine is based on roughly 70% consumption. In a tough Michigan economy, this CRN member and her family can return to responsible spending in 6 months rather than 3 to 5 years. Furthermore, not only did she avoid bankruptcy, but also, her creditors got something rather than 90% odds they would have gotten nothing were she to have filed chapter 7 bankruptcy.
If you find yourself running out of money before you run out of month and live in Michigan (or anywhere in the US for that matter) check out Consumer Recovery Network when you are researching debt settlement as one of your 3 legitimate options to deal with debt.
Every day thousands of consumers — hard working businessmen and women, mothers, fathers, grandmothers, students — walk through airport security where their purses, bags and wallets are screened and cleared on their way to their new destinations. Yet, unbeknownst to their carriers and their fellow passengers, they are carrying highly explosive materials onto their planes — ticking time bombs in the form of little pieces of plastic, that could blow up at any moment and incite what could amount to personal financial terror.
I am, of course, talking about credit cards, because the banks that issue them have had the ability for years to explosively increase the interest rates on your outstanding balances for virtually any reason. Through the artifice of carefully thought out contract provisions and court precedents in selective states, banks have had free reign to set off their own version of a hidden bomb, which consumers have carried willingly after being aggressively solicited and enticed into playing the card issuers’ profit making game.
I’ve Been “Jacked”!
The explosions set off by card issuers when they cause your interest rates to go through the roof, and thus increase the minimum payments and the cost of the purchases you already made with the card and had budgeted for can set off other explosions in your vicinity — the rates on other cards in your purse or wallet may blow up too. While it can only take one rate increase to ruin an already weak budget, a series of such explosions often leads to the destruction of a consumer’s finances and bankruptcy.
Interest rate increases on credit cards have been a huge source of profits for banks, but the current recession and the joblessness faced by millions of card holders has caused the detonation of their little bombs (which banks handed out like candy prior to the recession) to blow up in their faces.
The default rate on these credit card accounts areat historic highs. For more on this, please read this recent post on Mike Shedlock’s (Mish) blog: reflections-on-credit-card-fees-and-chargeoffs.
Now however, with the soon to be enacted CARD ACT, many of the banks’ trick and trap policies, which were designed to ensnare the public into becoming debt servicing slaves, are about to be curbed. However, banks will and have already begun to adjust to the coming new reality by finding new ways to profit from their plastic explosives.
One way they are doing that is by switching consumers’ interest rates from fixed to variable rates based on a formula that might charge say 12.9% above prime. Although this switch may not seem like a big deal right now with federal interest rates at historic lows, those rates will most certainly rise in the not too distant future, perhaps significantly, and when they do, the cost of using their credit cards will increase for consumers. In other words, those plastic explosives will detonate in consumers’ wallets yet again, sending potentially more shock waves through their finances. And unfortunately, I suspect that the timing of these future interest rate increases will come at a time when our economy is widely recognized to be solidly on the path to recovery.
For another example of how far those who issue standard grade plastic explosives in the name of profit will go to get around the CARD Act, please read nationally-syndicated personal finance columnist Kathy Kristof’s personal story in her recent blog post, Credit Reform and My New 703.8% Card.
Kristof wrote: “Consumer reporters were all crowing about a 79.99% rate credit card that was launched in response to credit reform a few months ago–collectively horrified that a law designed to cut rates and eliminate sneaky fees was inspiring increasingly abusive bank behavior. I thought that was about as bad as it gets until I took a close look at the statement for my new Macy’s card, which I had opened with “instant credit” while Christmas shopping. It made that 79% card look like a bargain.”
For additional information about the CARD ACT and to learn how you can win free help from Consumer Recovery Network, a fair and ethical debt settlement firm, by sending it your personal story of what happened to you when one of your banks triggered your plastic explosive and the rate on your credit card went sky high, visit CARD ACT-CRN Contest.
Credit Carnage
More than half of the debt-stressed consumers my company has consulted with over the past several years has indicated that “a plastic explosion” was a key factor in their being unable to keep up with their debts. Furthermore, if you’ve been hit by plastic shrapnel, I know that you will easily relate to the analogies I have used here. I know they are appropriate because I work with the carnage of these explosions every day.
Looked at in this perspective, card issuers and their fee traps have already blown up the finances of millions of consumers. How many more explosions will we see between now and February 22nd when rate jacking, as we have known it, will end? While I see the variable interest rate ticking time bomb referenced earlier in this blog as having the greatest potential to spark renewed controversy over credit cards, many card issuers have already mentioned they will revert back to the annual fees they charged years ago and that they will also be limiting the rewards programs that they used to compete for market share and consumer loyalty.
{So, what’s in your wallet?}
By the way, a great place to compare credit card interest rates and reward programs and to read consumer feedback about specific cards is “Credit Card Ratings”. Now, more than ever, in this rapidly changing credit card marketplace, it is important that you use respected, reliable resources to research and understand the credit products you are using or considering using.
“There is nothing like this feeling of being debt free. Free from the stress, the worry, the anxiety. All the folks at CRN have given me this freedom, you have given me the ability to enjoy my life again. Thank you again, so much for all that you guys have done for me.”
“I think it is wonderful to have someone like you out there, to help people with these type of circumstances. So many, like myself, don't know what to do or who to turn to. Keep up the good work!!!”
Having worked with consumers who are struggling with debt in one form or another for many years, I have always endeavored to compile informative resources geared towards a better educated consumer.
Every day thousands of consumers — hard working businessmen and women, mothers, fathers, grandmothers, students — walk through airport security where their purses, bags and wallets are screened and cleared on their way to their new destinations. Yet, unbeknownst to their carriers and their fellow passengers, they are carrying highly explosive materials onto their planes — ticking time bombs in the form of little pieces of plastic, that could blow up at any moment and incite what could amount to personal financial terror.
