Travis Plunkett
Travis Plunkett
fresh impact large number ordinary people
They'll never get a fresh start, ... And over the long haul, this can have a significant impact on the economy, if a large number of people can't get back to being ordinary consumers.
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Some people prefer telephone counseling. Some people prefer in-person counseling.
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We're going to see people in a debtor's prison without walls, ... They'll essentially slip through the safety net, hit the ground and then sink into an underground economy.
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If your credit card bills are completely out of control and far beyond your ability to afford them, then the relatively minor breaks that credit card companies offer to people in credit counseling may not provide enough breathing room for some people to afford a three- to five-year debt-management plan.
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People are just fed up with the approach that the large credit-card issuers have taken over the past five years. They're fed up with an increasing number of traps and tricks. They're tired of being hit with a fee every time they blink.
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We support credit counseling, especially if it's delivered early, and this is not early intervention. This is late intervention at the point where people have decided that bankruptcy is the only way for them. We just wonder whether this kind of late intervention will be helpful to too many people.
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The law has a one-size-fits-all approach, ... It treats people who have been hit by hurricanes in the same fashion as people who have ended up in bankruptcy from gambling or overspending or misusing the credit they were given.
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The bill simply doesn't balance responsibility between families in debt trouble and the creditors whose practices have contributed to the rise in bankruptcies.
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Taking on debt to accumulate savings is an obvious contradiction. It seems more like a clever marketing ploy than a legitimate method for increasing savings.
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What the credit bureaus are most interested in is gaining market share in the increasingly lucrative market for credit scores.
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Credit card lenders are luring consumers onto a minimum-payment treadmill. Consumers don't have the information they need to get off of it.
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Bankruptcy is an important safety net that families hit by unforeseen circumstances depend upon. The federal government should be bending over backwards to help Katrina's victims get back on their feet, not throwing up new barriers to bankruptcy.
caught
Once you're caught in that, you're often stuck,
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Your credit report is your passport to your essential financial information. Increasingly, what's in your credit report determines whether you'll get credit and how much you'll pay for it.