I'd be curious to know if this service is limited to helping people set up payment plans? I'd be pretty concerned if this is the case - I used to work in this field for a charity providing debt advice in the UK and pretty much rule number #1 is to advise somebody of all of their options, including stuff like bankruptcy.
A service that does not do that is doing a pretty bad job imo. If you have spent any time with people who have debt problems you would know that by the time they seek help they are in a situation whereby (for a large % of cases) bankruptcy or court-ordered payment plans are the only viable option they have. Getting somebody onto a payment plan when they should be going bankrupt is doing them a huge disservice.
I considered some years ago going into this market myself but I could never get past the need for face to face meets with clients. Getting them to accurately provide you with enough information that you can give them proper advice is hard enough in person, let alone online.
In any case, I'll be interested to watch this and see how you guys get along with it. Good luck.
djm - This service is not limited to setting up payment plans, and will include education, budgeting, and community. We definitely don't try to push any one method over the other, and will in fact suggest that the customer reaches out for legal aid in certain situations.
Hi, thanks for your reply. It's good to know you're trying to provide a comprehensive service.
I'm still pretty sceptical however because I think you will encounter a lot of cases that are difficult to diagnose just by looking at a persons data.
For example, the first ever case I dealt with was an autistic lady who had been scammed into buying broadband when she didn't have a computer. She only understood that she had signed up to the service when she started getting debt collection letters for not paying the bill. If I hadn't met her in person and only seen her data I probably would have just set up a repayment plan instead of writing to the ISP and challenging her liability for the debt which is what I actually did.
You'd be surprised how many odd cases like this pop up.
I definitely agree. There will always be a place in the market for face to face consultations. After all, credit "counseling" is an act of counseling, not just hard financials. To us the four pillars of financial stability (for customer already in financial distress) are Education, Budgeting, Counseling, and Community. We can obviously provide some of these but not others. The idea here is to leave the counseling to the experts, but be able to offer something to the vast majority of Americans who go through credit counseling today but only really need a little extra push to get them on the right track again.
A service that does not do that is doing a pretty bad job imo. If you have spent any time with people who have debt problems you would know that by the time they seek help they are in a situation whereby (for a large % of cases) bankruptcy or court-ordered payment plans are the only viable option they have. Getting somebody onto a payment plan when they should be going bankrupt is doing them a huge disservice.
I considered some years ago going into this market myself but I could never get past the need for face to face meets with clients. Getting them to accurately provide you with enough information that you can give them proper advice is hard enough in person, let alone online.
In any case, I'll be interested to watch this and see how you guys get along with it. Good luck.