Insurance products and services offered through BOSS and BRG. BOSS and Becker Retirement Group are not affiliated companies of AEWM. Retirement Advisors (BOSS) and AE Wealth Management, LLC (AEWM), both SEC Registered Investment Advisory firms. Investment advisory services offered by duly registered individuals through B.O.S.S. “And make sure the organization will customize a debt-reduction plan for your specific needs.” Good luck.We are an independent financial services firm helping individuals create retirement strategies using a variety of investment and insurance products to custom suit their needs and objectives. “Pick one that has a good rating with the Better Business Bureau, and check with the attorney general’s office in your state,” Dvorkin suggests. features a list of state-licensed credit counselors, as does the Association of Credit Counseling Professionals. Incidentally, legitimate credit counseling organizations do exist and they can be a big help in keeping overzealous creditors at bay. Just put it in the employee’s file, or the circular file, and forget about it.” Even if one shows up, he adds, “a boss is under no legal obligation to answer it. They’re not going to slow down to write a letter,” says Dvorkin. That usually won’t happen because “these people are calling from boiler rooms where they’re making 15 calls an hour. If a debt collector asks for any information about an employee, tell them to send the request in writing.” You don’t say how your boss has responded to the bill collectors, but “managers should not give out any information about an employee, because it may run afoul of employee-privacy laws,” Dvorkin says. “The bigger the debt-buying market gets, the more aggressive people will get about collecting what’s owed,” says Dvorkin. Since a certain percentage of borrowers are bound to default, even in boom times (which these aren’t), more players-including some unscrupulous ones-will be jumping into the lucrative debt collection game. “People who were cautious with credit during the recession are starting to run up those balances again,” Dvorkin says. It doesn’t take a math whiz to see that extracting even half of what those debtors owe, which has been estimated at over $140 billion, has huge profit potential.Īnd second, banks are once again loosening the purse strings and issuing more credit cards with higher credit limits. Rocked by high default rates during the downturn, many creditors have written off more than 90 million consumer credit accounts-from medical bills to unpaid gym memberships-as uncollectable, and then sold them to investors for as little as 4 cents on the dollar. They’d even call your parents and your neighbors, to try to embarrass you into paying.” Now, he says, agencies are trying to revive some of those old tactics for a couple of reasons.įirst, a market in consumer debt has sprung up. “It gets expensive pretty quickly.”ĭvorkin remembers the bad old days before the FDCP when “debt collection was the Wild West. Debt collectors who continue to phone you after they’ve been asked to knock it off are liable to statutory damages of $1,000 per instance, “plus state penalties, which can be even higher,” Dvorkin says. Martindale-Hubbell’s national directory of attorneys, for instance, lists 9,160 of them. “There is now a regular cottage industry of lawyers looking for FDCP violators,” he observes. What if the calls keep coming? It’s unlikely, says Dvorkin. Then put it in writing, and keep a copy of the letter so you can prove you wrote it. and after 9 p.m., but if you’d rather not hear from them at all, ask that they contact you only by mail. The law already says they have to leave you in peace before 7 a.m. While you’re at it, you can also stop bill collectors from calling you at home. Under the federal Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCP), along with similar state laws depending on where you live, “if an employee requests that the collection agency stop calling him or her at work, they have to comply,” says Dvorkin. now have debts in collection, and only a fraction of them know they can limit debt collectors’ phone calls with just a few simple words,” says Howard Dvorkin, founder of personal finance advice site and author of Power Up: Taking Charge of Your Financial Destiny. Do I have any rights here? Can I put a stop to this? - Red-Faced in Richmondĭear RFR: You do have rights, including the right to keep your personal finances private. Now, they’ve even started calling my boss, apparently to embarrass me into paying. The problem is, we still have outstanding medical bills and other debts that have been handed over to a collection agency, and lately I’ve been getting calls from them at work.
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