Provanta on the Radio (not for everyone)
June 6, 2008 · Print This Article
Earlier this week an upset caller called in complaining about our radio ad. He asked, “Why does your company help people get debt relief? Don’t you think people should be paying off their debt like I am because it’s their responsibility.”
Even though the caller hung up before our representative could respond, I would still like to address his question.
The caller is right. People should be paying off their debt and it is absolutley, without a doubt, our client’s responsibility to do so. The clients that we enroll do not have any misconception about how much they owe or what their responsibility is. The problem they have is in paying the debt.
Provanta enrolls clients with a financial hardship. Some of our clients have lost their jobs and it took months for them to find another one. Some of our clients have experienced a medical hardship or had a loved one go through medical difficulties. Others are struggling as single parent and some have made a series of bad decisions such as purchasing a home they could not afford or starting a business without truly understanding the financial liabilities. Regardless of the different backgrounds of our clients, they have one very serious commonality. They cannot financially afford to keep up with the monthly payments their creditors are demanding.
In this situation, they have a few options. They can try to declare bankruptcy if they qualify. They can simply stop paying their creditors and hope that it all just goes away. They can stop spending money on other items like utlities, rent, food, insurance in order to pay their creditors. Or they can look for help from a reputable debt relief company, such as Provanta.
Provanta cannot and does not force creditors to accept settlements. We do not have a magic wand that makes our client’s debt disappear. The creditors make the final decision about whether to forgive a debt and accept the settlement based on the information we provide regarding our client’s hardship. The creditors who agree to the settlements accept the fact that our clients truly don’t have a way to pay and that they’ve enrolled with Provanta in order to be responsible, resolve the account as best they can in light of their financial problems, and to prevent the debt problem from escalating even further.
So, to summarize my response to this caller: Yes people should pay their debt and take responsibility for it and that is exactly why our company exists. We help people resolve their unsecured debt.
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Right. The smug only see one side of it. They forget that this is not like a BK, where creditors are forced, by law — law is force — to abandon the debt. We negotiate for debt forgiveness. The BK courts discharge debt as an uninvolved third party.
There’s a distinction there.
The other part most don’t consider is that we are only able to remain in business, doing what we do, because we benefit all three parties: clients, ourselves, and creditors. Again, we don’t have “convenient” laws at our disposal to shove our proposals down the throats of creditors. If the creditors perceived no benefit to what we do, they would not cooperate with our efforts, we would achieve no results for clients, and would be out of business.
So, what benefit do the creditors perceive? Very simply: an avenue to stop throwing good money after bad. It’s bad policy for a creditor to simply believe a debtor, and most debtors would probably find it very difficult not to overstate their hardship, if they have one at all. Moreover, the creditor has a reputation to maintain. They simply can’t easily back off collection efforts, for fear of word getting around and everyone jumping on the forgiveness bus.
What they need is someone with whom they can develop trust, so that when that person or company says: you need to make an exception here, they tend to believe it.
And, of course, that implies a responsibility on our part. We can’t bring them a deal unless it will stand up to scrutiny. We have a reputation built over years to maintain, and no one deal — or dozens — is worth risking that trust; which is why we do our very best to make sure that clients coming into our program have a bona fide hardship.