If you cannot afford to pay your credit card debt and would like to avoid bankruptcy, how can you overcome the burden of too much credit card debt?  The answer is simple.  Just stop paying that unsecured credit card debt. Focus on more important monthly necessities and secured debt.

If you cannot pay, do not attempt to settle the debt and saddle yourself with more payments. That simply prolongs your financial stress and bad credit.

Yes, bankruptcy does offer you protection from creditors, while this selective, informal bankruptcy does not. But, you can avoid debt collectors with the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA) and local consumer protection laws. That  will prevent a ten-year stain of bankruptcy on your credit report.

Under the FDCPA you have to the right to deny and dispute your debt, to demand validation of your debt and to instruct debt collectors in writing to stop all collection activities. Denying and disputing a debt you owe is not a reflection on your character, it is simply a legal strategy to force debt collectors into properly documenting your debt.  Never admit to the debt and do not get tricked into doing that by a collection attorney.

Writing debt collector letters

Your debt validation (DV) letter serves notice that you are going to be difficult to deal with.  Debt collectors work on commission.  They do not get paid until you pay them.  So, would they rather work with legally difficult people who know what they are doing, or other consumers  willing to ignorantly submit to their demands?  They will go where the money is.

But what about the eventual credit card lawsuit?  Collection attorneys are just like debt collectors.  They follow the money.  The FDCPA considers them debt collectors first, attorneys second. They must respond to your debt validation letter. And, a proper DV letter tells them what documents they will have to produce should they initiate a credit card lawsuit. In my case, two collection attorneys for debts totaling over $30,000 stopped contacting me after receiving my DV letters.

If the collection attorney is representing a junk debt buyer, they will have difficulty producing documents (an original contract and an accounting for the alleged amount owed) from the original creditor.

If the collection attorney is representing the original credit card bank, they too will have difficulty producing proper documentation supported by a signed affidavit from an employee with personal knowledge of the alleged account.  Apparently, it is just too much work for the bank to properly document defaulted credit card debt.

You can read about the documentation troubles of Bank of America and Chase in my recent blogs.

In most cases an informed answer to a credit card debt summons demanding documentation is enough to make the collection attorney drop the case. A good debt validation letter is enough to dissuade them from filing one to begin with.

To legally eliminate credit card debt, you will need the right debt validation letter. Consult my Credit Card Debt Survival Guide.

The Original Post How to Legally Eliminate Credit Card Debt

New York Times’ Joe Nocera’s recent column Why People Hate the Banks has many pundits wondering why people who owe and are confronted with credit card lawsuits do not answer their summons and demand proper documentation.

It used to be that an original creditor, a credit card bank, was the most difficult to defeat in  a credit card lawsuit. But, J.P. Morgan Chase Co.’s problems with robo-signing credit card debt affidavits, as originally reported in American Banker, have caused followers of credit card debt trends to revise that thinking.

Now that Chase is no longer suing, what is happening to its outstanding credit card debts?  They are being sold to junk debt buyers (JDBs).   A recent purchaser of my Credit Card Debt Survival Guide is being sued in Maryland for a Chase credit card account purchased by a large, well known junk debt buyer.

American Banker started with Chase, then recently it pointed out the problems of Bank of America’s credit card debt

Collection attorneys are looking for default judgments.

operations.  “Bank of America sold collections agencies rights to sue over credit card debts that it has privately noted were potentially inaccurate or already repaid,” writes Jeff Horwitz of American Banker.  Each month one junk debt buyer bought debts with a face value of as much as $65 million for 1.8 cents on the dollar, he reports.

Those of us close to these issues have known for some time that if you do get to court and ask for documentation, the debt buyers drop the case. It is not worth it for them if they have to provide actual proof.  And now, banks like Chase and Bank of America cannot properly document their claims.  Together those two banks account for one-third of the credit card market, according to cardhub.com. I had another purchaser of the Credit Card Debt Survival Guide tell me when he got to the court date for his credit card debt demanding documentation, the lawyer for the bank, another large credit card operation, said let’s both just go home.  He had no documentation from the bank.

So, to avoid public scrutiny and bad PR, the banks want to sell their debts to junk debt buyers (as if they have not done it in the past.) Here is what one publicly traded JDB wrote in their annual report as reported in the Columbia Journalism Review.

We believe the current trend toward consumer protectionism could lead to judicial proceedings or practices that create increasingly challenging requirements that could limit our ability to effectively pursue litigation on accounts.

If you owe, now is the time to resist credit card lawsuits. Read my other blog posts, and get my Credit Card Debt Survival Guide.

The Original Post Banks and Junk Debt Buyers Cannot Document Their Credit Card Lawsuits

Debt collectors threaten consumers with credit card lawsuits for credit card debt they cannot afford to pay. If or when a summons does arrive most consumers do not respond because they know they owe the debt, so they conclude they have no defense and suffer a default judgment.

But now given recent developments, if they do respond and demand the junk debt buyer or even the original credit-card-bank creditor legally document their credit card debt, they will probably make the lawsuit go away.

JP Morgan Chase Co.’s robo-signing problems (see Part I) have American Banker concluding, “With the template for challenging collection procedures already established in the mortgage market, a broad attack on banks’ debt collection practices in other areas of consumer lending could expand rapidly.”

excerpts from the American Banker article . . .

“Banks actually keep pretty crummy records,” says Peter Holland, a University of Maryland law school professor who focuses on consumer debt.

“The person [filing an affidavit] doesn’t have personal knowledge of the records, even though he says he does,” says Charles Debaulm, an attorney for the National Consumer Law Center who has litigated robo-signing involving mortgages and other types of consumer debt. When challenged by a competent consumer defense attorney, “the debt [collection agency] buyer will simply dismiss the suit.”

What has worked in the favor or creditors is the fact that defendants rarely show up in court, enabling creditors to win default judgments in most circumstances. However, when lawyers have put up a defense in such suits, they boast of winning the overwhelming majority of even contested cases.

“Getting judges to focus on the lack of proof in debt buyer cases has taken awhile,” Holland says. “But often the exact same kinds of problems exist in the original creditor cases.”

Rochester County, N.Y. Judge Philip Straniere  found problems extended to Chase’s own collection efforts and dismissed 150 Chase collection cases that relied on dubious affidavits. The documents “appeared to be signed in large numbers by only a few individuals,” the judge wrote in an opinion first cited last year by the Wall Street Journal.

Learn how to defeat debt collectors and collection attorneys.  Read my Credit Card Debt Survival Guide.

The Original Post Credit Card Debt Collector Lawsuits: Where’s the Beef? Part 2

Collection attorneys are easily defeated.

When a debt collector attorney confronts you with a photocopy of your signed credit card application, a copy of a generic, unsigned credit card agreement and a few of your past credit card statements in a
credit card lawsuit, what do you do?  Without thinking, you admit to the debt, making his case for him.  Because, in today’s legal environment, without your admission, his documents will not be strong enough to get him a judgment against you for the debt you owe.

Last June, a New York judge threw out JP Morgan Chase Co.’s lawsuit to collect a few thousand dollars in credit card debt from a New York consumer.  According to American Banker, the judge described as “robo testimony” the statements of the bank’s document custodian — a 17-year Chase veteran — and made it clear that he believed Chase had failed to present evidence to support the accuracy of its own records.

Could this be the emergence of a trend in credit card debt similar to the nationwide robo-signing mortgage scandal?

American Banker says, ”. . .  a growing number of judges, state attorneys general, federal agencies, consumer attorneys and academics are concluding that banks may be susceptible [to poor documentation] in other areas of consumer lending, including the credit card market.” If banks prove unsuccessful in defending themselves from claims that their records are shoddy, they run the risk of inviting a new regulatory crackdown and legal battles over the validity of claims involving tens of billions of dollars in unsecured [credit card] debt, concludes American Banker.

Those photo copies of a signed application and agreement and the print outs of computer records of past statements must be accompanied by an affidavit sworn to and signed by someone with personal knowledge of your credit card account to be considered as evidence of your debt in court.

It appears, given the way banks run their credit card computer operations, personal knowledge of any one credit card account does not actually exist.  We wonder what the ratio of credit card accounts to bank employees involved in credit card operations is; 1,000 to 1, 5,000 to 1, 10,000 to one?  How can any one person have personal knowledge of that many accounts?  . . . The answer is they cannot.

Next: If credit card banks cannot document defaulted debt to legal standards, what does that mean for consumers who have defaulted on their credit card debt and live under the threat of a credit card lawsuit.

If you have credit card debt you cannot pay and are worried about debt collectors, learn how to defeat debt collectors and collection attorneys.  Read my Credit Card Debt Survival Guide.

The Original Post Credit Card Debt Collector Lawsuits: Where’s the Beef? Part I

The easy answer to that question is to calculate how long it will take you to pay off your credit card debt, when you can afford to do that.  (Do not use commas or decimal points, e.g., $50,000 at 20%, $1000/month would be 50000, 20 and 1000.)

Do your debt calculator calculations indicate that you are ailing financially?  What are you options–debt counseling, debt management, debt settlement, debt negotiation, or debt consolidation?  Those professionals all want you to pay them to help you get out of debt.  Can you afford to pay them?

Today, one in seven consumers is faced with the non-payment payment option for dealing with their credit card debt.  Typically that option is expressed as bankruptcy.  That is where you pay a bankruptcy attorney and trustee to help you “solve” your debt problems.

For credit card debt, there is one more option; simple non-payment.

If you reach the point where you cannot pay off your credit cards, do not sacrifice monthly essentials for those bills.  Just stop paying them.  Keep making home mortgage, auto loan, healthcare, etc. payments.

The non-payment option means you, like every other seventh consumer will be contacted by debt collectors and collection attorneys threatening you with court action.  And, since you owe, how could you possibly defend yourself against court action for a credit card debt?

Psst. Debt collectors and collection attorneys do not want you to know this, but consumers who owe can fairly easily defend themselves

Debt collectors tell scary lies over the phone.

against credit card court action. There have been a lot of news stories lately about robo-signing (You can read the detail in my recent blog.).  Collection attorneys and junk debt buyers, and even credit card banks themselves, have difficulty documenting the historical detail of our credit card debt. They cannot produce a signed contract because there is none.  And, their biggest problem is finding someone who has actual personal knowledge of our credit card account; someone to sign an affidavit attesting to the accuracy of copies of monthly statements or signed applications, or whatever weak documentation they hope will serve to bully us into submission.

The cure for credit card debt you cannot afford to pay is non-payment and learning to be a sophisticated consumer commission-paid debt collectors and attorneys would rather not spend their time with.

If you are worried about your credit card debt and debt collectors, get my free  Seven Dangers of Not Knowing How to Deal with a Debt Collector.

The Original Post Credit Card Debt: How Sick Are You?

A proper written response to a credit card debt summons is an answer and denial of the charges with a statement of your affirmative defenses.    Those defenses are focused on a demand for documentation of the credit card debt they allege you owe.

The plaintiff must prove you owe the debt, and they cannot do that.  So, they let the clock tick away to the next court date for your case.  They hope you will get cold feet and try to settle. They hope you will admit to the debt.  This recently happened to one of my ebook customers.  When he got to court the plaintiff’s collection attorney greeted him and said , “Let’s both of us just go home.”  He had no documentation in answer to my plaintiff’s demands.

Why can’t debt collectors and collection attorneys prove you owe a credit card debt?  That has to do with the way credit card companies handle their credit card computer systems.  Yes, they can provide copies of a few monthly statements, or a copy of a generic credit card agreement, or even a copy of a signed credit card application.

But, for any of those documents to be legally binding in court, they must be accompanied by an signed affidavit from a employee with personal knowledge of a card holder’s account.  In data centers that process hundreds of thousands of accounts, no one has personal knowledge of any one account.

When you demand a full accounting of interest, charges, payments and fees as proof of how they arrived at the amount they allege you owe, there is probably no data to produce it.

Debt collectors lies and threats are much worse than the reality they promise  when a credit card debt summons letter arrives in your mail box.

Get my free  Credit Card Debt Survival Guide.  Find out why you should not panic if you receive a credit card debt summons.

The Original Post Credit Card Debt Summons – How You Can Resist Collection Attorneys

Knowing how to deal with  debt collectors when you owe and cannot afford to pay is becoming a basic survival skill in today’s economy.

According to blogger Matt Stoller, a former senate policy advisor and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, the Federal Reserve’s last Quarterly Release on Household Debt and Credit  the number of people subject to third party collections has doubled since 2000, from a little less than 7% to a little over 14% of consumers.  Ten years ago, one in fourteen American consumers were pursued by debt collectors.  Today it’s one in seven.

Most of those contacts will be about credit card debt. According to creditcards.com, Total U.S. revolving debt was (98 percent of which is made up of credit card debt) $793.1 billion, as of May 2011 (Source: Federal Reserve’s G.19 report on consumer credit, July 2011)

Danielle Kurtzleben writes in U.S. News & World Report (February 27, 2012) “The population of Americans in debt is not only growing; it’s changing demographically, says consumer advocate Bill Bartmann, the CEO of debt collection company CFS II. Those changes could have political implications. ‘In the old days, 10 [or] 20 years ago, the people who weren’t paying their bills, we thought of them as a substrata of society.’

That perception has changed, he says. The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau CFPB estimates that 30 million Americans have debt with collection agencies, and Bartmann estimates that 20 million of those had never been in debt before. This demographic includes those “who went to work for a living, went to school, had good jobs, bought a home and did all kinds of the right things.”

Credit card debt is unsecured.  Debt collectors lies and threats are much worse than the reality they promise.  If you owe and cannot pay, there is hope for defeating debt collectors.  Get my free  Seven Dangers of Not Knowing How to Deal with a Debt Collector.

The Original Post One in Seven Consumers Are or Will Be in Contact with Debt Collectors

A recent issue of Forbes Magazine reports that in the wake of the Great Recession, debt collectors are not faring as well as we would assume. They are feeling the difficult economy as much as most other businesses, rather than cashing in on the increased number of consumer debts.

Excerpts from the Forbes article — The Myth of the Debt Collection Boom

According to a recent study conducted by Ernst & Young on behalf of accounts receivable management (ARM) trade group ACA International, Employment in the ARM industry declined 4.5 percent from 2007 to 2010. Why? {Forbes has} been told that there is more debt than ever to collect – especially in the period from 2007 to 2010.

The Ernst & Young study revealed that collection agencies have been forced to reduce the commission rates they charge to their bank and creditor clients . . . . In 2005, the average aggregate commission rate charged by collection agencies was 23.5 percent, meaning that the companies kept 23.5 percent of what they collected, returning the rest to clients. In 2010, that rate had dropped to 18.8 percent.

The pressure is on these commission paid mercenaries to produce.

This means debt collectors and collection attorneys are even more motivated to cut corners, like not properly documenting a debt to comply with a local court’s rules of civil procedure, specifically that is by either not providing, or robo-signing, affidavits, supposedly from someone with personal knowledge of credit-card-holder’s account, supporting copies and printouts of documents “proving” you owe the debt. Or, they will do other things such as lying about a pending lawsuit, suing beyond a credit card debt’s local statute of limitations (SOL), or tricking a consumer into making a token payment on an old debt beyond the SOL to make the debt new again.

This is also all the more reason why debt collectors will avoid consumers who know how to properly answer their collection notices in writing. They cannot afford to waste their time chasing the knowledgeable few. who are difficult or impossible to collect from.

If you owe and cannot pay, there is hope for defeating debt collectors.  Get my free  Seven Dangers of Not Knowing How to Deal with a Debt Collector.

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The Original Post Despite Publicized Crackdowns, Debt Collectors Likely to Continue with Lies and Threats

If you are worried about the possibility of having a credit card debt lawsuit filed against you because you have credit card debt you cannot afford to pay, you are one of 30 million Americans who could be affected by debt collection, according to the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. While the CFPB is likely to put an end to it, you should be on the look out for the robo-signing of documents used in credit card lawsuits and to threaten you into paying what you cannot afford to pay.

A blog, A New Kind of Killer App: RoboSigning 2.0, in the Huffington Post written by Bill Bartmann, the CEO of debt collection firm CFS II describes how robosigning begun by mortgage banks to foreclose on homes could be an even greater problem for those consumers with overdue credit card debt. While he is ostensibly on the other side, Bartmann has been called the ‘No. 1 Collection Industry Consumer Advocate’ in the world.

What is robo-signing? Courts require that bank papers supposedly documenting a consumer’s debt be accompanied by a affidavit from an employee with personal knowledge of that debt. According to Bartmann, robo-signing began with mortgage foreclosures “when some clever companies decided to take the “person” out of “personal knowledge” and have employees sign documents without having any clue about the
borrowers.”

In his blog Bartmann says;

In one [mortgage bank] case, a single employee was found to have signed around 10,000 documents in one month. Embarrassed banks halted foreclosures, and just last week the government announced a settlement with some big banks over these types of abuses.
When the news hit of how banks were abusing borrowers through robo-signing, not everyone was shocked. Some major players in the debt-collection business were leaning forward at the television, with broad smiles on their faces and pens in hand. They were furiously taking notes because they realized it could be soooo much better for debt collectors.

Michelle Weinberg of the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago said: “If sloppy record keeping and problems with false affidavits is a problem with mortgages, it’s 100 times bigger in credit card accounts.”

The good news is today courts are aware of credit card banks’ and their collection attorneys’ sloppy record keeping and false affidavits. It is just up to the indebted consumer being sued to insist on their right to due process and to insist the collection attorney prove their case with documents supported by an affidavit from someone with actual personal knowledge of their debt. Fortunately the reality is in a credit card bank data processing center no one employee has personal of any one credit card account.

If you owe and cannot pay, there is hope for defeating debt collectors.  Get my free  Seven Dangers of Not Knowing How to Deal with a Debt Collector.

The Original Post More on Robo-Signing by Debt Collectors to Win Credit Card Lawsuits

Here are more reasons why you can successful not pay credit card debt you can not afford to pay, if you know what you are doing with a debt collector.

You do not have to pay if your debt is older than your state’s statute of limitations for debt collection by court action.  The statute of limitations (SOL) for open accounts begins when a consumer fails to make a payment and varies from state to state.  Here is a state-by-state breakdown of SOL.

You should not make a token a payment on an old debt to get a debt collector off your back. That action makes the debt new again and restarts the statute of limitations on it making you fair game for the debt collector again.

The New York Times reported . . .

. . . the Federal Trade Commission said that Asset Acceptance, one of the nation’s largest debt collection companies, had agreed to pay a $2.5 million civil penalty to settle charges that the company deceived consumers when trying to collect old debts.

Asset Acceptance, based in Warren, Mich., was charged with a variety of complaints, including failing to tell consumers that they could no longer be sued for failing to pay some debts because the debts were too old. The company’s collectors also failed to inform consumers that paying even a small portion of the amount owed would revive the debt — in other words, making a payment would extend the amount of time the collector could legally sue.

Among other things, the complaint also contended that the company — which buys unpaid debts for pennies on the dollar from credit card companies, health clubs and telecommunications and utility providers and tries to collect them — reported inaccurate information about the consumers to the credit reporting agencies. It also said that Asset Acceptance failed to conduct a reasonable investigation when it was notified by one of the credit agencies that a debt was being disputed.

If you owe and cannot pay, there is hope for defeating debt collectors.  Get my free  Seven Dangers of Not Knowing How to Deal with a Debt Collector.

The Original Post Debt Collector/Debt Buyer Fined $2.5 Million for Lying to Consumers about Debt Statutes of Limitations

Consumers who have fallen behind in their payments of unsecured credit card debt worry about debt collector phone calls and collection attorney lawsuits.   The truth is debt collectors have trouble documenting credit card debt well enough for a court to grant a judgment against an alleged credit card debtor.  To make up for that fact, debt collectors tell lies and make threats over the telephone.  And, collection attorneys file numerous lawsuits hoping most who owe will not respond and suffer a default judgment.

According to the Los Angeles Times,

“the new Consumer Finance Protection Bureau is ready to crack down on the nation’s large credit reporting and debt collection companies, proposing tough new oversight on two arcane financial groups that affect nearly all consumers.“

“Debt collectors and credit reporting agencies have gone unsupervised by the federal government for too long,” Richard Cordray, the bureau’s director, said Thursday in announcing the effort.

Debt collection has been second only to identity theft in consumer complaints to the Federal Trade Commission in recent years. The bureau estimated that 30 million Americans have debts in the collection process.

The three large credit reporting companies, Experian Information Solutions Inc., Equifax Inc. and TransUnion, have records on 200 million Americans and hold the key to getting a credit card or mortgage — and increasingly even a job.

Jean Ann Fox, director of financial services at the Consumer Federation of America, said “You can prevent problems, make sure everybody is complying with the law and make sure consumers aren’t being abused or harmed, rather than trying to get a refund after the fact or a penalty after the fact or an injunction after the fact”.

If you owe and cannot pay, there is hope. Seven Dangers of Not Knowing How to Deal with a Debt Collector.

View the original article here

The Original Post New Consumer Finance Protection Bureau to Regulate Debt Collectors and Credit Reporting Agencies

CBSnews.com recently reported JPMorgan Chase & Co. has stopped filing credit card lawsuits around the country to collect credit card debt.
The American Banker reported on Jan. 10, 2012 Chase had shut down a national collections operations responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in monthly judgments.

Credit card lawsuits are debt collector threats that can be defeated even if you do owe.

In April 2011 the Wall Street Journal first reported that Chase had stopped filing credit card debt lawsuits in Dade County, Florida.
CBS News speculates that the homeowner foreclosure illegal robo-signing of documents may also be a problem for bank credit card debt documentation. “In a federal whistle-blower complaint filed last year, a former vice president of JPMorgan, who worked on sales of overdue credit-card loads, alleged that bank employees robo-signed paperwork used to see legal judgments against card users.”

According to the American Banker story, a Chase collection attorney, who was fired with many other in-house debt collectors, speculated that fired employees could not testify when the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency investigated possible fraudulent documentation of debts at Chase.
In the past few years fraudulent documentation of credit card debt by junk debt buyers and their collection attorneys for the purposes of winning court judgments against credit card debtors has been brought to light by the Wall Street Journal, Baltimore Sun and other publications.

The Journal and the Minnesota Attorney General reported it was the business plan of Encore Capital Group to final credit card debt lawsuits in large numbers and wait for most debtors to default, doing nothing further and providing no documentation to any debtors who answered their summonses.

The New York Times reported in April 2010 that debt collection attorneys expect a large number of people to default and not appear to defend themselves in a debt collection lawsuits.
A few years ago most courts gave debt collection attorneys the run of the court to collect credit card debt from “guilty” debtors. Today, it is a different story, “guilty” credit card debtors can win by demanding debt collection attorneys prove they owe the alleged debt with proper documentation.
Readers can consult my Credit Card Debt Survival Guide for the proper way to demand documentation of an alleged debt when answering credit card lawsuits.

The Original Post Major Credit Card Bank Stops All Credit Card Lawsuits

Writing debt collector letters

Where your credit is concerned, non-payment of credit card debt is better than bankruptcy.  Bankruptcy is a ten-year deep freeze on your credit, while the effects of late payments and charge-offs ease with time.  As those bad marks age to their seven year limit on your credit report, your credit score will improve, if you are making timely payments on other debts.  This final piece of credit card debt relief, healthy credit, will happen a lot faster without bankruptcy,

To improve your credit score, if you are having difficulty paying your credit card debts, first check it. You will be able to identify the negative listings, as well as any inaccurate information that is negatively impacting your credit report.  You should subscribe to a monthly service ($10-15 month) to track it regularly.

Next be sure to “opt-out” of any sale of your name by the credit reporting agencies to marketers.  This also removes you from the eyes of scam debt collectors and keeps your credit affairs more private.

Then you should pay off any small debts with negative listings – cable, electric, cell phone, etc. in exchange for a delete listing from your credit report.  These typically do not appear on your credit report, so they can be removed by payment.

The listings of the original credit card banks will be difficult to remove.  But, with a properly crafted letter you will be able to remove the negative listings of any junk debt buyers or collection agencies on your report.  You have the right under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act to instruct them to stop all collection activities.  A federal court has ruled that negative credit listings constitute collection activity. Hence, their bad marks will come off your credit report with your letter.

Real, doable credit card debt relief is a process of letter writing to debt collectors and collection attorneys. The same holds true for credit repair.

Finding credit card debt relief is a learning experience. Get started with my free Seven Dangers of Not Knowing How to Deal with a Debt Collector.

The Original Post The Credit Repair Part of Credit Card Debt Relief

Too many people choose the wrong kind of credit card debt help. They deceive themselves into believing they can manage a debt management payment plan, or they can afford to begin a lump sum debt settlement savings plan (where they skip their monthly payments to bank that money with a debt settlement firm to one day offer a final lump sum settlement amount).

Are you looking for ways

? Can you afford to pay your monthly credit card statements or not?  Or more basically, are you actually willing to face the truth and make that decision?  Is it easier for you to just  sacrifice monthly essentials to make a credit card payment to avoid debt collectors and collection attorneys should you go into arrears?

Credit Card Debt Help

Many people have refinanced their homes to take out equity for credit card debt help, only to lose their home to foreclosure because they could not afford the higher monthly mortgage payment.

Are you worried about your credit rating?  The way to avoid sacrificing monthly essentials, bankruptcy and real credit problems is to make a surgical decision to stop credit card payments to right your financial ship.  Three years after I stopped paying $63,000 in credit card debt, I was able to secure an auto loan for a new car.  The payments you DO make offset the credit card debts you do not pay on your credit report.  Your credit rating damage is temporary if follow these tips

on how to get rid of credit card debt

.

If you cannot pay, you are not alone.  According to creditcards.com, Fitch Ratings reported the number of credit card defaults was 11.52 percent in September 2009.  That is over ten million people for debt collectors to chase.

Credit Card Debt Education

The reality is debt collectors and collection attorneys only chase the people they think they can collect from.  They work on commission.  They do not want to waste their time with a consumer who owes but cannot afford to pay, and who knows how to respond to them in writing.

I teach people how to respond to debt collectors and

how to get rid of credit card debt

.  As I learned, it can be a useful life skill.

I am in this space because I have found few professionals like me who provide useful free information,teach how to get rid of credit card debt, who are not trying to charge large fees for help they only promise, and who offer a money-back guarantee on any fees charged.

Finding credit card debt help is a learning experience. Get started with my free Seven Dangers of Not Knowing How to Deal with a Debt Collector. To learn how to get rid of credit card debt.

The Original Post How to get rid of credit card debt – How Can You Get Out Of Credit Card Debt?

How does credit card debt relief fit into the protests against very uneven wealth distribution in this country . . . or, into the clash between traditional American values and

deep-pocket, short-term profiteers looking to the U.S. taxpayer for a bailout when things go wrong with their financial schemes?

Bank of America, Chase, Citigroup, and Capital One, all too-big-to-fail institutions, all bailed out for billions in 2008, issue over two-thirds of the credit cards used in the U.S. While they each benefited from a bailout when misfortune or poor judgment befell THEM, none of their credit card holders can hope for the same. The Credit Card Act of 2009 curtails many of the past abuses of which credit card banks are capable. Unfortunately, the banks are already finding ways around the new regulations, according to creditcards.com.

Today’s fact of life is these banks are not the friendly community banker down the street.  They are not worth suffering for.  After six months they must write off our bad debts.  They plan for those expenses.  The collection of those debts is the concern of junk debt buyers (ten cents on the dollar), their debt collectors and our conscience.

Can’t pay credit card debt?

Were you blindsided by a hike in interest rates or a reduction in credit limit? Or, did a medical catastrophe, job loss, ballooning mortgage, divorce, or just poor budgeting cause you to fall behind?

When payment is not possible, is it worth sacrificing monthly necessities for the sake of a credit card payment? Were you suckered into a debt settlement payment plan, which backfired when you could not finish the payment schedule? Did you know only 20 percent of debt management plans are completed.

As the too-big-to-fail banks well know, financial hardship can happen to anyone. The difference is banks do not have emotions, but we do. The key to credit card debt relief is getting control of those emotions.

The guilt and fear we experience with financial hardship is no better than the anger and frustration being vented in the March on Wall Street movement. Once the fear of bankruptcy or a court judgment is controlled, we can proceed with the non-payment of the credit cards we cannot afford to pay. And, we can frustrate debt collectors and collection attorneys seeking to control us with our fears.

How to get rid of credit card debt

Finding credit card debt relief is a learning experience. For my free guide CLICK – ->

11 Reasons Why You Can Survive the Non-Payment of Credit Card Debt

The Original Post Can’t Pay Credit Card Debt? How This is Related to Occupy Wall Street