One of my favorite topics is Debt Settlement. You want to know why? It is because it is a favorite topic of my clients, also. In fact, I have even done a commercial on Debt Settlement- -you can see it on the website under “Our Commercials”. It is one of the black-and-white commercials, the one starring the old man with the ponytail (me).
What inspired me to be so passionate about what should be a boring topic? Here’s what inspired me: my clients continue to lose thousands of dollars on what has become, in many cases, a warped and cruel scam.
Just the other day, I met with a potential client, tail between his legs, who admitted to have been taken by one of these companies, a company that has now gone bankrupt. My client had been paying about $550.00 per month for a year-and-a-half to this company, a loss of almost $10,000.00, and had nothing to show for it but the papers he handed me that said he was being
sued by one of his credit card companies.
I wish he would have seen our commercial earlier, or had read our website, or had done some careful research (though you really do have to be careful here). And I wish he had come in to see me to at least discuss his debt issues so that he could have heard about alternatives. But he didn’t. We can still help him, and we will be able to stop the lawsuit, but I know he wishes he could get his $10,000.00 back.
Let’s not confuse Debt Settlement with the type of work done by legitimate places, such as Advantage CCCS, who works with the credit card companies to get the the best rates it can which can have the effect of lowering your payments. Often my clients come to me after they have been to Advantage and tell me that the payments offered by Advantage are higher than those of, say, Company C (a fictitious name), a debt settlement company. Of course, the reason why Company C is offering a lower payment may be because they are not legitimate!
It’s easy to say what people want to hear, to offer low payments, to tell you of all of the benefits of the company when you are on a phone hundreds or thousands of miles away and you don’t have to see the client’s faces when the program you snookered them into has failed and left them much worse off than when they started.
You don’t have to take my word for it. Read it from the Consumer Federation of America in an article that appeared recently in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette.Then give us a call. You will be glad you did.