Maybe you’ve heard it, it has something that sounds like gospel music playing in the background and the song has a lot to references to freedom.  I’m not against freedom, but it’s clear that they were targeting a demographic, and that demographic is African-American people, particularly women

I market to a specific demographic too, so there is nothing inherently wrong in targeting your audience to make sure your message reaches the right group of people who need your services, but this is more nefarious.

African-American women are being targeted by this company because they believe they are an easy mark for an inferior product at a lower price.  This debt settlement company’s product is inferior because they are not lawyers, in fact you will probably learn that their employees are in as much debt, if not more, than you are.

I have heard the Spanish language version of this ad.  This ad has Latin music playing in the background, so what?  As stated earlier, there is nothing wrong with demographic marketing.

What is wrong is the reason behind this target.  This company preys on these people because they are unlikely to fight back.  The Spanish speaking customer who is wronged will call in and suddenly they will not be able to find a Spanish speaking employee on site (by the way, I just hired my first bi-lingual employee today, his name is Manuel, and he will be converting this site into Spanish over the next few weeks).  Spanish speakers have less access to the courts because of the language barrier and if there is an immigration issue hanging over their head, they do not want to be noticed.  One immigration lawyer told me this company can market to Hispanics because “if they screw up and the customer tries to sue, they will get them deported!”

I suspect this company is targeting African-American women for similar reasons.  Most African-American women who go to a debt settlement company do not have extra money to hire a lawyer to chase this company if they fail to deliver.

I might be completely off-base.  There may not be any bad intention on this company’s part, but I’m pretty good at smelling a rat, and non-lawyer debt settlement is a lousy product.

If you are ready to resolve your debt problems and are ready to talk to a lawyer who will show you the respect you deserve, call me at 484-661-2891 or email me at jim@padebt911.com, and you can experience freedom from debt too.

It was doomed to happen.  In 2005, houses routinely fetched $250,000 to $300,000 yet the median salary in the Lehigh Valley was around $36,000.  Given the miserable performance of this economy, it’s unlikely that the average salary has gone up much since then.

The housing boom here was out of control, no doubt about it.  A lot of people were relocating from New York City and its suburbs to the Lehigh Valley for its lower taxes and lower cost of living, but because these folks who were used to paying $600,000 or more for a house didn’t think twice about paying $300,000 for a house that just 10 years ago might have gone for $130,000.

To make a long story short, the New York contingent artificially inflated the sale price of homes.  The New Yorkers are not totally to blame for this however, interest rates were kept artificially low by the Bush administration and borrowing money was never cheaper.  Another factor that went into this was the rampant fraud and the fact that you could have zero proof of income, no down payment, and qualify for one of these variable rate mortgages.  If Bernie Madoff had come up with this, they would’ve given him the chair.

So that brings us to today.  The same houses that were selling for $300,000 are now down in the $180,000 range, and I think they’re probably still too high.

A client came to my office on Friday.  He is a single man with a three bedroom 2 1/2 bathroom house in Allentown.  He hadn’t made a mortgage payment in a year, but now he was back to work in able to make his payments again, kind of.

My clients mortgage payment was $1105 per month.  He had a second mortgage of $242 per month.  His weekly take-home pay was somewhere in the neighborhood of $500.  If you’ve done the math you can probably see where this is going.

To make a Chapter 13 plan work for my client, he would have needed to pay a minimum of $300 per month and probably more to the Chapter 13 trustee.  With take home pay of $2166, my client would have expended close to $1900 per month just to stay in his home.

Clearly Chapter 13 bankruptcy wasn’t going to work for this man, however he had a 401(k) with about $100,00o in it.  He asked me if he should take a withdrawal from it to pay the past the past due on his house to stay in his home.  Looking at a situation, I had to tell him no.

Here’s why, he was going to dip into his retirement, something the Chapter 13 trustee cannot touch and very few creditors can go after, to save a house that he owed $30,000 more on than it was worth, and moreover, a home that he really did not need.

What was a bachelor doing a three bedroom two and half bathroom house?  He had never been married, his girlfriend lives in another apartment, so really he has a house way too large for his needs.   Now if he were financially able to keep the home, I wouldn’t care, because generally speaking real estate is one of the best investments out there, especially now, but this man was going to struggle to pay his mortgage even after taking a loan out of his retirement.

The bottom line is this, I could have taken the man’s money and filed a Chapter 13 bankruptcy for him, and it might have even worked. Chapter 13 bankruptcy is not for everybody, neither is mortgage modification, you may feel bad or a responsible for letting your house be foreclosed on, but the banks were just as irresponsible in their lending.  The banks went to the government and got a bailout.  No one asked your opinion when they took your tax dollars to bail these people out, nor did they offer you one (and its not coming either).

Sometimes it’s best to let the banks foreclose on the property, I know it hurts, but rather than spend $1400 per month on a home too large for him, my client is going to find an apartment in the $600-$700 range which will work for his budget and will allow him to regroup financially.

Once a foreclosure is over and my client has resettled, I advised him it was in his best interest to file Chapter 7 bankruptcy.  My client racked up nearly $30,000 in credit card debt trying to save his home. If he made the minimum payments, it would take in 35 years or more to pay his credit cards off.  Furthermore, some of the credit cards had been charged off and sent to collection and some of these agencies have become sue-happy lately.

Again chapter 7 bankruptcy is considered by some to be irresponsible, but the reality is these banks were irresponsible lending money to people who couldn’t possibly pay it back.  We don’t have debtor’s prison in the United States for reason, don’t allow yourself to be put in a debtor’s prison without bars.

Hopefully my client will take the next logical step and follow through filing Chapter 7 bankruptcy as we discussed at the meeting.  If you are unsure about your situation and want to know whether or not it makes sense to even just try to stay in your house, call 484-661-2891 for your free no obligation consultation.  You can also e-mail me at Jim@padebt911.com.  All contacts are kept strictly confidential.

Two of the highest rate filers are Discover Card and Capital One, with Discover Card probably outstripping Capital One at a rate of 5 to 1.

I’m not sure why they’re doing this.  In Pennsylvania, credit card companies are not able to garnish wages, however they are able to garnish bank accounts.  In my experience the average person being hauled into court for credit card debt doesn’t have more than a couple hundred dollars in a bank account at any given time, so I don’t really understand why these credit card companies are going to the expense of getting a judgment.

It can’t be to have priority in a bankruptcy proceeding because at the end of the day they still unsecured creditors in a Chapter 7 bankruptcy and are probably not going to get anything.  They can’t garnish wages because as mentioned above they are not allowed to.  So why are credit card companies now suing in the Magistrate and Court of Common Pleas courts the state of Pennsylvania?

I think it’s about intimidation.  The average consumer doesn’t know that a credit card company cannot garnish wages.  The average consumer doesn’t know the credit card company can garnish a bank account.  The average consumer who has a charged off a credit card probably has other credit card debts and other debts pressuring  them, and it might be that the credit card company wants to be the first on their list to be paid.

It probably isn’t worth the day you will lose taking off from work to fight this suit.  You need a competent attorney to defend your rights, and you need one quickly.  If you owe Capital One, Discover or some other renegade credit card company$4000 and they get a judgment, and then they somehow grab it from your checking account in a garnishment, that money is gone forever.

The most important the thing about dealing with your debt problem is being in control.  It’s a roller coaster ride up and down from 0 to 150 mph in a second.  Scary eh?  What’s scarier is that you’re at the control of this roller coaster.  You can either let go a handle and let things fall the way they may, which will almost always result in your creditors taking advantage of you, or you can choose to control the situation yourself.

Before some rogue credit card company gets a judgment against you and pulls the last money you had saved out of your emergency fund, to pay for months of late fees finance charges inflated attorneys fees, you should contact an attorney who will help defend your rights.  Yes the credit card companies have rights, and they are not shy about defending them, but you have rights too, and you probably don’t have the time to defend them while you try to make it through to the end of this week.  The credit card companies have an army of attorneys to defend their rights, don’t you owe it to yourself and your family to take advantage of at least a free consultation?

When you are ready to defend yourself against rogue credit card companies, out-of-control debt collectors, and all the other financial creatures that go bump in the night, contact me at 484-661-2891 or e-mail me at Jim at padebt@911.com for your free no obligation consultation.

When I was a debt collector it was pretty clear to me that I could catch more flies with honey, but that was always my style as I was never one who was going to be abusive to a debtor, but I was in the minority, even though the collection agency was based in the a place that prided itself on being polite and genteel.

I recently got a phone call from someone who did not become my client.  They didn’t really need to be.  They owed about $900 to BellSouth, a telephone company that as you probably guessed is based in the Southeast United States.  This bills was owed from back in college in 2006 and this debt collectors had a habit of calling my client every night around 9:30 PM.  We ascertained that this debt collector was based in Alabama which is in central daylight time or an hour behind us, so when it is 8:30 PM there it is 9:30 PM here.

According to The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA), debt collectors are only allowed to call at times that are not considered inconvenient.  As a general rule,  The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA) allows debt collectors to call between 8 AM and 9 PM where the debtor is located.

So it would appear that we had a Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA), but it’s important to be able to prove that there has been some sort of malicious behavior behind the violation, meaning that that collection agency can’t be making what could be considered an honest mistake.  The law itself doesn’t specifically require malicious behavior for there to be a violation, there are very few judges that will find for a plaintiffs against a collection agency that was just making an honest mistake.

The woman never got rid of their Alabama cell phone number.  Her phone number had a 205 area code.  205 is an area code for northern Alabama, which is in the central time zone, so the debt collector was making an honest mistake calling at 9:30 PM because this debt collector thought they were calling in Alabama phone, and in Alabama it was only8:30 PM.

You hear advertisements on the radio, especially around here, about secret ways to get rid of your debt.  Some will also advertise about actually suing and reclaiming money from the debt collection agencies.  Others will talk about how Congress has given credit card company so much money that they need to clear their books and they’re going to give you a discount on what you owed them.  My father used to say if it sounds too good to be true it probably is and while I’m not saying these advertisements are misleading, I’m not not saying it either.

There are plenty of legitimate Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA) violations to go around, we don’t need to be making them up.  The woman decided she wanted to keep her Alabama phone number.  We were able to talk to BellSouth and negotiate a settlement for less than the original amount owed.  I did that one for free, it was a short phone call, an opportunity to deal with a creditor I hadn’t dealt with in the past, and away or me to do a good deed.   A few days later BellSouth sent a letter with an offer which the young lady accepted.

If you find yourself with a lot more than $900 worth of debt and you’re not sure about bankruptcy or debt settlement but you would like more information, please call my office at 484-661-2891 or e-mail me at jim@padebt911.comand we can set up an appointment for a free consultation.