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...about these problems and then offer these simplistic solutions which make it sound like their advice will solve all your problems. If the consumer finance industry gets its way by pimping out Congress to pass the "Bankruptcy Reform Act" for political donations, virtually very few of these senior citizens, as well as other people, will be able to discharge their credit card debts. They will have to enter a payment plan, lasting about 5 years, to use whatever income is left over after paying personal expenses and senior creditors, to pay off credit card debts. This story says nothing about that.
Credit counseling is a very iffy prospect if you can find one that isn't a sham, as in collecting your payments but never passing them on to your creditors. Even ones that are on the level sometimes don't pay the creditor on time, which screws up the repayment plan that was negotiated with the creditor and allows them to unilaterally withdraw from the plan. In fact, creditors are not even obligated to enter into a repayment agreement with a consumer or CCCS; it's completely optional. Sometimes the counselors themselves give consumers wrong advice like suggesting clients file bankruptcy when they really shouldn't have. Another thing consumers aren't told is that a Consumer Credit Counseling notation on your credit report has just the same effect on your credit scoring as if you filed bankruptcy; so really what's the difference? Additionally, CCCS is funded, for the most part, by the credit card industry. I wish there were a reporter with the guts to cut the b.s. and tell people the honest truth about consumer credit counseling for once.
On the other hand, negotiating with a creditor yourself can be a crap shoot too. Some companies will temporarily reduce payments, or the interest rate, but others will demand a substantial up front payment before accepting lower payments and/or reducing the interest rate. Some creditors won't even negotiate at all and will just turn the account over to collections. Nothing about this in the article either.
Personally, I think the FTC website on the FDCPA is good as a basic primer on this law, but not something I would recommend as the definitive source unless you already have a legal background, a lot of time on your hands and are able to research case law for FDCPA suits filed by private individuals and understand what the opinion is saying. A better bet would be to Google for law firms that specialize in consumer law and/or represent debtors, or some consumer help websites like Bay Forum, because many have explanations of how the FDCPA works in plain English as well as summaries of recent cases. Besides that, the FTC really doesn't take abusive debt collection complaints seriously because it spends most of its time on "easy cases" like spam, phony weight loss pills and dubious 900 psychic lines. In my opinion, Congress really doesn't take abusive debt collection practices seriously either because if they did, they would permit a bigger penalty than $1,000 per FDCPA violation. To some of these companies, $1,000 is merely the cost of doing business. State attorneys general really don't take individual complaints of abusive debt collection seriously either. The general rule is, unless the loss is $50,000 or more, a state attorney general won't touch it. Which means an AG has to receive a ton of complaints about a particular company first before acting.
I guess the point of this rant is, the whole consumer finance system needs to change and the government could be doing a lot more about it than simply letting credit card companies basically write the laws for them.
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