You're the Debt-Settlement Company You've Been Waiting for
Deceptive debt-management companies were in the news again recently. This time in North Carolina Lawyer’s Weekly, where correspondent Sabine Vollmer described an intramural scuffle between state regulators and naughty attorneys who lend their names to out-of-state debt settlement companies. The story’s nothing new to us. Few people who walk into our office do so without engaging in a mental stroll by the debt-settlement shop windows. And who can blame them? Debt-settlement seems like a nice compromise between the impossible (paying off one’s debt in full) and the last-resort kind of action that bankruptcy holds. But what we routinely tell prospective clients (and what was confirmed by the Lawyer’s Weekly article) is that the debt-settlement world should be entered into with caution. Most, if not all, communication is conducted long-distance by phone, mail, or the Internet and there is little protection against fraud except for the usual tangle of federal agencies. That’s not to say that bankruptcy is always the best option. It’s probably right to view bankruptcy as somewhere near the bottom of your list of debt-relief options. No where so near the bottom as bank robbery, but certainly in that neck of the woods. But rather than seeing a debt-settlement company as your happy compromise, it may be best to try to act as your own debt settlement company: call your creditors, one at a time, and make them offers of 30, 40, or 50 cents on the dollar. They might not accept. Or they might accept and demand that the settled payment be made at once. But that’s a possibility even if you’re working with a debt-settlement company. They don’t have any secret power or sway over your creditors. You can call and make an offer just as easily as they can. Of course the benefit to this is that you’re no worse off if you fail. If the creditors say “no,” or they won’t go lower than 70%, or they demand that the settled amount be made in full, at least you haven’t wired $1,500 to some guy named Tony in Boca Raton who told you that he and President Obama had a secret way out of debt. In other words, the half-way point between avoiding debt default in the first place and filing bankruptcy is not a debt settlement company, it’s you’re own creativity, ingenuity, and determination to reach a settlement of your debt on your own. To adapt a line from those pollyanna campaign days of 2008, “you’re the debt-settlement company company you’ve been waiting for.” And of course, if you’re not, we’re here, too.
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For more than 20 years, the Sasser Law Firm has been helping individuals and business owners sort through financial hardships to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Our North Carolina bankruptcy attorneys are all board-certified specialists, which means we have passed a complex exam, undergone a thorough peer review, and continue to earn legal education credits in this ever-evolving area of law.
