While your debt settlement company is in negotiations with creditors, one ammunition tool used on your behalf is the personal circumstance that brought you into the program in the first place. This is what we refer to as the Difficulty of it.
At one point, your signing agent asked you the question “what in your life brought you to the point where you felt our services could help you?” Many consumers only view a large amount of debt or high interest rates as a hardship worth getting all the help they need and, in some cases, full debt forgiveness. The truth is that no court in this country will accept any of those reasons as a hardship due to the fact that almost everyone is in the same financial situation. With my clients, I have chosen to define a DIFFICULTY as sad, depressing but TRUE stories. There should be something like:
• Significant decrease in income
• Divorce resulting in financial hardship
• Job’s lose
• Significant expenses for family care of the elderly
• Significant expenses for children (including tuition)
• Limited Fixed Income with Insufficient Funds to Cover Basic Expenses
• Significant medical expenses
• Legal action resulting in financial hardship
• Job relocation resulting in financial hardship
• Tax problems resulting in financial difficulties
• Death in the family resulting in financial hardship
• Accident resulting in increased responsibilities and inability to cover basic expenses
There must be something in your recent history besides high interest rates that made your financial life difficult, so as a rule, we insist on sad, depressing but TRUE stories. Many times one of our Customer Service Representatives will be in an informal conversation with a consumer reviewing their account and learn that the customer has had a death in the family, a major accident that turned into major surgery, or some other tragic experience. which resulted in a downward financial spiral. .
At one point, I had been working with a client over a twenty-month period when, out of the blue, he mentioned the death of five family members over a three-year period before and during his joining the debt relief program. He had been so busy dealing with damage for so long that he hadn’t considered sharing a loss as great as his difficulty. This is not uncommon with people. Perhaps it is pride or a sense of responsibility in us.
The act of living itself is a challenge and no one will get out of life alive. So don’t be afraid to share with your representative the negatives in life that got you to this point of overwhelming credit card debt. This is something negative that we can turn into a positive with nothing to be ashamed of. There are not a few of us who have experienced this same obstacle in our own lives. We understand and we are here to help.