May 20, 2009
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Credit Card Debt: The Options, Pt.2
Plight of the consumer.So, on the other side of the coin we have the desperate credit card consumer displaying extreme tactics just to survive this disastrous economy. Some of the new and extreme tactics that the credit card consumers are employing are:
o Running up credit card debt in order to keep their homes and buy food;
o Committing themselves to high interest and payments without knowing if they’ll have a job. It used to when leaving work at the end of the day and someone would say “See you tomorrow.” the proper response was “Good night”. But, now the proper response is “I hope so.”;
o Going into default at unprecedented rates’.So, what’s a credit card consumer to do? The right thing to do, of course, is to pay the debt off and in a timely fashion (as best can be done anyway). The good news is that there are a plethora of credit card settlement agencies to help. The bad news is that many of these agencies are rip-offs.
You can usually tell which ones these are by the impossible claims they promise. There is no free ride and these people are not the genies they claim to be. Credit card dept doesn’t just disappear without a hitch. Often times ‘the hitch’ doesn’t show up until down the road after hapless consumers are down the road and already committed.
Things have become so bad that the attorney general of New York, Andrew Cuomo is launching an investigation on over a dozen of these agencies. The biggest rip-off is the substantial ‘up-front fee’ they always try to get. Sometimes they go after as much a 15% of the total debt. Then, once they have this money in hand, they fail to deliver the promises.
The last thing these well-meaning, but hapless, credit card victims need is to ripped off from hard-fought finances that could be applied toward the debt.