For many years I’ve written about the tactic some debt relief companies use to trick consumers into signing up for some form of debt relief.
Consumers receive offers in the mail for a personal or debt consolidation loan and are told they don’t qualify, but “we have a better program.”
Damon Day and I discuss the issues raised in I Was a Bait and Switch Debt Relief Sales Person in this podcast.
Listen to the Podcast
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Here is a list of some past links on this subject.
I Was a Bait and Switch Debt Relief Sales Person
WSJ Article Slays Debt Settlement Companies Using Personal Loan Offers to Bait and Switch
New Rescue One Financial Loan Offer Letter Still Raises Concerns
Rescue One Financial Still Sending Disturbing Mailer
Look at Mailers From My I Buy Junk Mail Program
Transcript
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Hey, Steve Rhode, your Get Out of Debt Guy from GetOutOfDebt.org. Today we’re doing a Debt Free Dudes podcast because with me is Damon Day from DamonDay.com. We’re going to be talking about bait and switch bastards. We see many examples of people receiving loan offers in the mail. They look magical.
Don’t they? They always look magical. This podcast is an outgrowth of somebody that you talked to recently. Can you give us a summary of that situation? Yeah. And recently, you meant yesterday? I’m sure he wouldn’t mind us sharing the story.
We won’t give any personal information. And he would be the only one that would know it was him I’m talking about, but it doesn’t matter who it was because we’ve been. Bitching about this for 20 years may at least 10. Oh my God. It’s the same shit, different day. It’s the same thing he saw. I don’t know if it was. I think it was a mailer, an actual flyer in the mail.
Yeah. Or a postcard or something offering an incredibly low-interest rate on a personal loan. It was like three and a half percent, debt, consolidation, loan. He called, and so many people have experienced that you don’t get offered the loan when you call. You get offered a debt settlement, debt validation, or debt relief program, which was not what you thought you were calling in for.
But the way it’s sold to people is very misleading. And that’s where the real problem is they get them on the phone under false pretenses and then obfuscate what they’re actually selling. And before somebody knows it, they think they’ve. They got some great programs and didn’t even understand what they had just signed up for.
I like how you said misleading because it is not misleading from many companies’ points of view. It’s intentional. Last year I got an insider who sent me. A lengthy document about exactly what it was like to work at one of these bait and switch debt relief outfits. He said the process worked by the company, purchasing leads names of people that were more likely to be attracted by this loan offer.
And then, the marketing partners would send out these flyers, make phone calls, send emails, and promise people debt, consolidation, and loans. And then they would call in, and they’d get an entirely different first, first off, not an entirely different sales pitch to begin with because they would be promised.
Thank you for calling. We’re going to review your loan application, and we’re going to give you the best level of service that we can. Basically, what they say is they put the person on hold, or they call them back. They’re all rejected and then given the sales pitch for the real thing they’re selling.
Which is what Damon some kind of debt relief program, either debt, settlement or debt validation or some BS
And I guess I misspoke when I said misleading. You’re right. I should have said intentionally misleading that said that’s better. That is better because of these loan offers I’ve written about. A lot of them, and thank goodness I have this buy junk mail program because people have sent me their offers.
And at first glance, they look like a preapproved loan offer, but it’s not until you read the fine print or you go to research the company that you’ll find that they’re just total bullshit, bait and switch offers. Now, the reason that they do this is because they work. You sent somebody an offer like that guy yesterday three and a half percent, he’s thinking.
Woohoo. The funny thing about it was he’s not even behind on his loans. No. So he was just looking at he actually was on 0% interest still at the time he was in the introductory period on a lot of those cards, but what he was looking, he was thinking ahead when that introductory period runs out, be nice.
If I could ship this 50 grand to a consolidation loan at three and a half percent, that’s cheap money. And he was using the money to invest in this business that he was doing. And he made a calculated decision that, Hey, at three and a half percent, that’s, I could just leave that debt on there and keep the cash and reinvest that back into the business.
So it’s, yeah, actually a very prudent move. If you could get money at three and a half percent and use it to grow the money at a higher rate, but here’s what happened. When he called in specifically in response to that 3.5% loan offer, they did the typical thing, got his information. Oh, let me check.
We’ll run it. And then did the, oh, I’m sorry. You don’t qualify for that loan for whatever reason. But then they said we have an even better program, though, that you do qualify for. So they were essentially saying we have another consolidation option, like 800 a. Over. He said either 54 months or 60 months. And he said his response was, well, which is it?
Is it 54? Or is it 60? And so when he ran the numbers, here’s why he was confused. Because again, I know what they’re doing, but most consumers don’t know what they’re being presented, but he ran the numbers. And what left him scratching his head was when you add up all the payments. So the actual repayment was less than the debt that he owed.
He owed about how’s that alone. Yeah. He owed about 50, and this guy said he doesn’t qualify for the regular consolidation loan, but he qualifies for the better program. That is actually only gonna be about 42,000 when it’s all said and done. So they were pitching it somehow as a no-interest loan. That also is not even a full repayment of the principal, but they never once came out and said, Okay, look, bro, this is debt settlement.
This is what we’re gonna do. You’re gonna stop paying all your creditors. They’re not gonna get any of this money. We’re gonna hold the money, then negotiate it down the road and try to save you some money. You said something that you’ve elaborated on in the past. And I think it is incredibly astute.
The salesperson said you didn’t qualify for this. But we have a better program. What sense does that freaking make? It’s if you have a better program behind the curtain, why were you leading with this other program? that is not as good, but I don’t qualify for that. So because I don’t qualify for this, you somehow have a better program.
I can qualify for. It doesn’t make sense. It only makes sense. If you don’t think about it, Yeah. It’s because that’s what the training and the script says, like this insider who sent this description of what it was actually like to work there. The training he says the first two weeks were dedicated to training, which was just glossing over stuff.
Then he had a script that he had to read, and he says in here, we talked about tone, handholding, temperature checks, and maintaining a steady series of impressions with a potential client as we led them through our sales pipeline, one of our trainers. A graying version of a dough wide football player, an archetype from any high school movie made in the seventies, imparted his favorite sales phrase on us.
How does this sound? You must be looking at a different inside sales guy because in the article I’m looking at that you wrote about in December, here’s how she describes it. I think it’s a, she it’s anonymous, so I don’t know. Yeah. Here’s how they describe the training. Because you what was your description?
The football guy. Read that again? Yeah, that’s in the script section. Oh, it’s the same one. It’s the same one. Oh, it’s okay. Here’s how she describes her other trainer. I remember our trainer, a pale, bearded plaid wearing, affecting a couldn’t her to fly. Nice guy routine circled that last mind-boggling figure with this dry-erase marker and wrote one word next to it.
Opportunity and the mind. The mind-boggling figure he circled was Americans’ amount of consumer debt, numbered in the hundreds of billions. But I just love how they’re so descriptive of their trainers. They also go on to say during the sales training that I immediately found odd: we were to refer to ourselves as financial consultants when introducing ourselves to clients and never a salesman.
Yeah. And you know what, let me give our audience the new definition of a financial consultant. So if you want to be a financial consultant in this business, I’m going to read from you verbatim what the requirements are for this person working at this company to now be able to refer to themselves as a financial consultant.
Are you ready? Steve, go ahead. And this is verbatim. So if you can do this, you can be a financial consultant. It says I and several other perspectives, salespeople were given a crash course in some basic finance. What a F I O score was in how to pull it chapter seven and chapter 13, bankruptcy, three major credit bureaus, and different forms of debt consolidation.
And then that particularly relevant factoid was Americans owed hundreds of billions. Once you’ve gone through it. You are now a financial consultant. That’s just it. Bless consumers. I try to make everybody that comes to the website, listens to podcasts, reaches out for information.
I really want them to be savvy consumers because until they are, and until that, they’ve got their ears perked up, and they’re a little bit careful. But, unfortunately, people fall for this damn sales pitch all the time. And what blows my mind is it is a commission salesperson making decisions for you that you believe is a financial consultant with your best interest at heart.
That’s just not true. We’ve been saying this for so many freaking decades now. So it seems but here’s—just a simple rule of thumb. And I know it won’t apply in every single case, but damnit, you’ll be right—99% of the time. So if you receive some kind of solicitation for help with debt, assume it’s bullshit.
It’s simple. Just assume it’s bullshit. Now you can verify, you can check it out, but yeah. Check it out under the filter of this is probably. It’s not going to be a good deal. Most of the time, most of these outfits are like phone rooms. You get the flyer you call in, and neither you nor the person talking to you has any idea what the hell they’re selling.
No, absolutely. They’re just there too close. Always be closing ABC. That’s what they’re doing. They’re trying to get their name on the board. Be the top producer, and make the most commissions. They’re not providing finance. For example, this morning, Damon, I answered a reader question on the site: a woman who was sold a debt settlement solution, living on $900 a month in social security.
I saw that I’m sure that salesperson sleeps perfectly fine at. How much do you want to bet they pitched her like three 50 a month or whatever the hell? I don’t even know how much debt she had or anything like that. I’ve built a career helping consumers who have been screwed over by these bait and switch companies and found me after the fact.
And then I have to try to unring the bells that they rung and fix their situation. It’s so much easier if they find me first, yeah, because they think they have a magical solution, and then it’s either myself or you that tells them what the truth, in reality, is they think. We don’t know what we’re talking about.
This bait and switch salesperson got the person all the way through the pitch. And then the next step is sending someone to your house for a face-to-face meeting. And generally, like this person says, it’s a mobile notary service, and they just send somebody out to tick a box that they met with you face to face.
The notary has little to no knowledge of what we’re actually selling. They just run through the boilerplate presentation and get the client to. That’s it. Yeah. And just to let the audience know, Steve and I are looking at an article that he wrote back in December that came from a tip that, know, somebody used to work at one of these companies wrote in and sent all this information.
And so if you want to get all the details, it’s a great little article that really opens your eyes to what’s happening. Just go to the get out of debt.org site. And you can literally just hit the search button, the search bar at the top, and type bait and switch. And that article and several others will show up, and then people can read all the juicy details.
Like this one is one of my favorites too, where she talks about starting to have some doubts because, remember, most of these people don’t really have a background in any of this stuff. So they’re just, coming in answer to, they’re trying to get a job basically. And right. So under doubts he or she writes at this point, some of the more experienced members of my sales cohort started having doubts.
Why did the intake process involve a debt consolidation loan? When we were there to sell this credit card modification program instead. Like they were even confused about why they were offering a loan because nobody ever got the loan. And then she says, or he, the words bait and switch started getting tossed around at, after work, drink outings.
But most of us were just excited to have found employment. The, that excitement, overwhelmed, whatever small misgivings we thought we had. And we started work determined to prove ourselves. So, yeah, I get it. It’s a message that I’ve heard. For decades, you and I have heard it’s the same thing over and over.
There are lots of good people that finally wake up and realize that what they’re selling and. They just can’t take it anymore. And they leave as this person says it was bait and switch cut and dried. I sat there hundreds of times saying I am the financial consultant assigned to your file thinking. I had absolutely no education, no formal qualification to advise anyone about their personal finances.
And here I would go digging around about their grocery budget, pulling their credit card, and selling them a credit card modification. If I were college educated with a master’s degree, I felt like I wasn’t qualified. I knew some of the other sales guys around me had barely gotten through high school.
It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so horrible because real people are getting caught up in this crap, and it just comes down to. I don’t care about the bait and switch part, whatever. They’re offering this at the end of the day. It’s what’s happening to that consumer.
If they end up enrolled in a program, mainly a program that they don’t even fully understand. It’s obtuse on purpose. That the scripts that they have, most people come away from that call knowing it’s not alone, thinking it might not be alone. But of still thinking it is a loan, and they don’t understand it, but it sounds good.
And it sounds like the monthly payments are going to be cheaper, and maybe they haven’t seen any other options. And there, too afraid to look at bankruptcy or something like that. And they just feel like they’re trapped, and they don’t really have any other way out. And maybe they call a couple of these outfits, trying to do their due diligence.
And then everybody’s got the same weird sales pitch that doesn’t add up. So they can’t all be ripping you off. It’s got to be legitimate if you’ve called four companies, and they’re all essentially pitching the same thing. So, no, they all suck. They all suck. Even what they wound up selling this credit card modification, debt, settlement program, whatever it was that is often called debt consolidation.
You’re sending one payment to the company, and who knows what happens to it. And because it’s one payment, when people say to me, what do you think about debt consolidation loans? I always get this like deer in the headlights look because what does that word mean to you? Yeah, because there’s so much bad marketing out there.
Everybody calls any modification debt consolidation, right? Yeah. It’s like they’ve hijacked the word, and debt settlement companies are selling their program as debt consolidation. And it’s how exactly is that consolidating? The debt. You’re just not paying creditors and sending the money to, according to this person, some fake company, that’s a shell company as a subsidiary of the main company, because the main company has too many bad reviews.
So they can’t use the name of that company and the sales pitch anymore. They have to use a shell company that is not old enough to have bad. I don’t think it was this one, but I had somebody else tell me that they worked for a company where when you reached a certain level and had reached so many sales, you would get promoted, and the promotion was, they would create a new company.
With you as the person in charge and a new name. And it was just like, a splinter of the other one. So your promotion was pushed to the head of the scam. This person goes on to say that the actual results of the program they eventually sold were very disappointing. He says, or she says, our company’s CEO gleefully presented a PowerPoint where he claimed a whopping 4% of enrollees graduated from the program.
So 96% of the people that got sold, this thing was making payments—and never having their debt eliminated. So yeah. That’s it’s kind of like I alluded to earlier, where it’s like neither person on the phone understands what’s being sold: the salesperson or the consumer. Neither one of them know what’s going on.
And I’m not trying to go bad on the concept of debt, settlement, and negotiation because it is a legitimate concept. But, I mean, you, under the right circumstances, somebody can actually get a lot of help if bankruptcy is not something that would make sense for their situation or they have some dischargeable assets, or they make too much money or, there’s all kinds of different, scenarios, people can get relief, negotiating their debts.
But the problem I have is the way. These companies operate the way they trick people into doing, rather than just telling somebody the truth and being okay with that person saying, yeah. So ruining my credit for a couple of years just doesn’t sound like something I want to do right now, rather than helping them find the right solution that they’re comfortable with.
They try to just sell this process to everybody that calls in. As you mentioned, the poor person is on $900 a month. Social security probably doesn’t need a damn debt settlement company. So, no, no, they could give the creditors the middle finger at that point, probably. And nothing would happen to them.
They’re on social security. It might be judgment proof. So that’s the big problem is consumers are being led down a path, and they’re. Purposely misled in order to make this sale. Not because that is necessarily a good option for the consumer and neither the salesperson nor the consumer. In that moment, know whether that’s a good option.
The consumer doesn’t know because they don’t really know what’s actually going to happen. And the salesperson doesn’t know because they’ve had two damn weeks of training, watching videos about how to pull your credit report. That’s it. They don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. And if you ask for answers, they’ll talk to you in circles.
From a consumer point of view, I understand that you don’t want to ask questions because you don’t want to feel stupid or you don’t know what you’re talking about. But here are a couple of basic things that you can do. If you get one of these mailers and you end up calling one of these companies, the minute that somebody says to you, I know you called about that program, but we have a better one.
Yeah. After you get rejected. Yeah. Hang up the phone right then. Yeah. But if they continue in their sales pitch and they’re relentless, ask them for a copy of the client agreement. That they’re going to ask you to sign, ask them for it in advance. Tell them that you want to review it. You want to read it, and you want to ask questions.
A scam company will. Everything. They can make up every excuse they can. They don’t want you to see that they want you to go. Yeah, it sounds good. And then they want to rush you through that agreement and get you to sign it. They don’t want you to know what you’re doing, and sometimes they’ll do the, we’re going to send somebody to your house.
You mentioned that earlier. Steve, why do they send somebody to your house? Because they’re trying to get around the telemarketing sales rules so they can charge you advanced fees. But they never tell you that, do they? Yeah. And I would ask why somebody needs to come to my house. I don’t even carry cash anymore.
Haven’t. We advanced to the point in society that you can do a contract online. They have something called DocuSign. Like, why do they need to send somebody to my house physically? I don’t about you, but I don’t open the door anymore unless I expect somebody. Oh, I certainly don’t. But the person that they send to the house is just there to read some stuff to you.
They don’t work for the company. They’re not financial consultants. They can’t answer anything about the client agreement. That’s just a warm body nearby that could meet this loophole for them to charge you all these advanced. Debt settlement door dash, baby. I just made that up right there.
That’s pretty good. I thought it was more like greed hub, a greed hub.
Yeah. One of the things that I do. For consumers, if they happen to come across me or find my website, I’m more than happy to interpret these contracts for people I’ve been looking at them. Oh, for most of my potential clients end up reaching out to me because they’ve called a couple of these companies.
They’re a little confused. They’re not sure what to do. And it’s real simple. We have a straightforward conversation. I could talk to you like a real person. I could answer your questions. And after you get off the phone with me, the most common thing I always get is you’re the first person I talk to that made any damn sense.
And the reason I’m making sense is because I’m telling you what’s actually going on. So it makes sense. When, what’s going on when you don’t quite understand it, it doesn’t make sense. The salesperson goes on to talk about the upfront fees that people were being charged, and they go on to say the upfront fees, a hollow legal and negotiations team face-to-face signings, salespeople posing as financial consultants who enrolled these people over the phone.
Advise them against bankruptcy and then vanish from the entire process. I’d get calls from disgruntled clients about their credit scores, tanking, and I would promptly refer them to our litigation department. I interfaced with them as little as possible. Once sales close, then they go on to talk about sales.
People knew what was going on. It’s been many years dam. Remember the days that all the salespeople would come into the site and try to beat us up and tell us we didn’t know what the hell we were talking about in the comments? No, I happen all the time. It were ruining their ruining. So their sales is what we’re doing.
Of course. Now this person says that the worst part was the manufactured competition management forced upon the sales team. In order to keep your sales job, you had to meet certain quotas or deals signed by your fifth month. If you failed this quota, you’d be fired. Hey, I get it. The people working at this company, they got a paycheck coming in.
It’s self-preservation. They’re just trying to close as many deals as they can at some point. I don’t know how many months it takes between just telling people this bullshit and getting them to sign and then just waking up one morning and going, this isn’t right. Yeah. And honestly, these poor salespeople, it’s not them.
They don’t have any background in this kind of stuff. They’re just trying to get a job. They’re brought into this room. They’re told all this great stuff and here’s what, how great our company is. And here’s how these awards we won. And here’s how we save, little aunt June. We save people from the big, bad banks, and they’re pumped full of all this stuff.
So most of these salespeople feel like they’re legitimately offering a great service, and they’re just doing what they’re told. And then eventually, they start to see the problem with what they’re doing, right? This person is. Eventually, the doubts start to set in. It’s this that doesn’t quite make sense.
Why am I selling people this when it’s actually this? And eventually, they’ve been there long enough to really start to realize. Something’s rotten in Denmark here. It’s not; why are we doing it this way? And unfortunately, now, and I’ve been in this position before, so I know it sucks now. So they’re faced with a major dilemma, and maybe they’re making great money.
A lot of these sales guys make great freaking money. The commissions are huge. Why do you think everybody recommends debt settlement on their freaking blogs? The payouts are huge. Get page. Why does nobody recommend looking at bankruptcy on their freaking blog? They’re not making any money and don’t get paid.
So maybe that’s the reason why people are told never to look at bankruptcy, only look at it as a last resort, because nobody makes any freaking money telling you. So maybe you should at least consider bankruptcy. It doesn’t hurt to look at it. But anyway, I’m going back to my point. So now you have this poor salesperson.
Maybe they got a family. They’re supporting their family. Maybe they’re making six figures for the first time in their life. They might be pulling down ten grand a month, and they’re like, oh man, I’m helping people getting them out of debt. I’m making all this money. I just bought a freaking new Beamer, whatever, and then all of a sudden, they start figuring out that it’s easy to dismiss that for a while. Eh, I’m making good money here, but eventually, they’re going to be put on this point. How do I feel about what I’m doing? And maybe they’ve been at it long enough. To start to see some of the results, maybe from some of the first clients they enrolled into a program.
Maybe they’ve heard about that client’s experience. And now they’re like, oh, that didn’t sound good. That’s not what I actually thought would happen. And that guy ended up filing bankruptcy, and I made a $10,000 commission or whatever. So now they have this very tough choice. Do I quit? And do something that fulfills me and makes me feel good about what I’m doing, or do I keep making this really good money that may be the best money I’ve ever made in my life?
Even the salespeople end up getting screwed over because, as the insider says, if you failed the quota, you’d be fired. That’s it. In my time there, when asked, I shook the hands of more than a few red-eyed salespeople on their way out in their fourth or fifth month. One of our trainers told us in the first two weeks; this company had a churn rate of about 40%.
So that means 40% of the employees are just leaving all the time. Later on, I suspected this fifth-month rule was because, at six months, one could apply for unemployment benefits, a snag this company wanted to avoid. And by that. Whatever deals the failed salesperson had already made was already yielding straight profit; no need to keep paying the sales guy if they couldn’t keep up, and best to keep the understanding of outsiders to a minimum.
Absolutely. Th this is probably the best two sentences. The scheme is simple. Once you understand it, it’s just taking money from those who already owe too much and are desperate to reduce their burden by any means. Yeah, which is why they pitch that we’re going to lower your payment. They ride that all the way, home to commissions, right?
We are going to lower your payment. You’re overstretched. You’re paying a thousand dollars a month. You do what I say, and you only have to pay 700. Doesn’t that sound awesome? Absolutely. Here’s the good part. Ah, Damon, let’s I can’t afford 700, so I can’t do the program. Hold on. Hold on. Let me check here.
I I, you I like you a lot. You’re a great person. Thank you. I’ve known you for three minutes, but I can already tell I really like you. Hold on. Yeah. I just talked to my boss, and I think we can pull some strings, move some things around, and we could get you down to 6 29.
How does that sound? Oh, if you can do that, I can sign up right now. Let’s get it. All right. Somebody is knocking at your door.
They better be bringing me a pie. That’s all I got. Hurry. The guy’s going to change my mind. I got a hot one. I got a hot one. Ding, ding, ding, bringing the closure called greed hub. Yeah, have you ever seen that? That you’ve seen that movie? Boy. Was it a boiler room, right? Boiler room. That movie, my favorite, is Glen Gary, Glen Ross.
Oh, you’re older than me. Yeah. Always be close. Oh yeah. I do like the boiler room. Yeah. No, that’s, it’s a lot like that. That’s what it is, but it just really sucks for both salespeople. And the consumers, I keep going back to that. No. Yeah, neither one of them wins in this scenario, the people that win or the owners of these companies that make millions of dollars.
And then when you feel the heat coming around the corner, they just close it down and set up a new company, and they keep going. So yeah. And the salespeople get the shaft. We’ve been hard on the salespeople throughout this podcast, but when you get fired or don’t meet your quota, you’re shown the door.
Whatever commissions you earned and were owed, go to the company. They don’t go to you anymore. I’ve talked to salespeople that have told me that there were cots in the office and cup noodles in the kitchen so that they could stay there as long as possible and continue to make calls. And imagine this: imagine an environment in which you’re a consumer, calling me for help.
Just like I’m a sales guy in one of these things. And I’ve got a family at home, and I’m not going to make rent next week. I gotta make this commission. I’m about to get fired. I haven’t made enough sales, and I. To make the sale. How in the hell am I going to, even if I did have any knowledge whatsoever, which most of these guys don’t, even if I wanted to do the right thing, even if I’m looking at your situation and going, ah, this guy is not a good fit for our program.
He can file bankruptcy and save $50,000 and rebuild his credit starting next year and be out from under this. How can I possibly do that in that kind of environment where I’m worried about making rent? I know I’m about to get fired if I don’t make the. So that’s the person that when you call these numbers on these flyers and stuff like that, it’s typically somebody in that scenario that you’re saying, Hey, I got this flyer.
Tell me how you can help me. They are in 100% sales. Closing mode. They’re not there. And imagine this. So let’s say I was a good guy. And I’m in this scenario. And I have some knowledge, and I’m like, oh wow—this guy. Oh, you’re on social security. Yeah. Have you, Hey, ma’am, have you thought about just considering bankruptcy, and I could talk to you about what it would mean for your situation and things like that.
And maybe look at that. First now, if you find something that you don’t like, definitely call me back, and we could talk about our program, but my program’s going to be a lot more expensive for you than if you just filed bankruptcy and, given your situation, this might make bankruptcy might make more sense.
I would get fired if I said that I wouldn’t be allowed to work for a company like that, even if I thought about it or knew about it. They are going to get fired. They’re not allowed. How long can you stay at a place like that? If you’re constantly telling somebody, yeah, this is not the right thing for you.
You should hire somebody else. They’re not. They don’t have the freedom to do that. You work in sales, your sales calls are being monitored, and you say something like that. I can just picture the steely-eyed person huffing across the office, walking towards your workstation, trying to get you off the phone as fast as possible.
No. Tell them the truth. Yeah. Yeah, no, it would be the pale, bearded plaid wearing, affecting a couldn’t hurt, a fly nice guy routine. That guy. Yeah. So it’s just, you got as a consumer, you just have to be smart. We’ve whipped a dead horse for years, but. Dude, if you get an unsolicited offer, just assume it’s bullshit.
It’s just so much easier that way. See it for what it is. This is a marketing piece. It’s an advertisement to try to get you to call. This is not. Good financial planning or anything else. This is trying to get you on the phone and pitch something to you. The other thing that makes consumers disadvantaged in these situations, and it makes it seem so miraculous, is that often, when people are in debt or feeling financial stress, They’re lost, alone, afraid, and confused.
They don’t know who to ask. They’re very embarrassed and ashamed about their situation. And in their mailbox on Tuesday comes this offer that looks like it’s going to solve all your problems. And that’s what causes you to pick up the phone? I would say I am biased for good advice, and I always. Think that daymondDay@damonday.com gives people.
Great, good, honest advice. You can talk to him on the phone. You can visit me at getting out of debt.org and send me a question through my website. I’ll answer it on the website. I’ll give you good, honest advice too, but. Just don’t fall for this bullshit. Yeah. And some parting wisdom. I would say if you’re in a lot of debt, you’re going to get these flyers all over the place.
So here’s what I would do before you start calling around, just go to credit karma.com. It’s free. You can go, and they can do soft poles. So if you really want to get a consolidation loan, just go to credit karma dot. See, if you can even qualify for any of those offers, don’t. Make sure they’re not doing any hard pulls, but you can get several potential offers that are soft pulls that won’t ding your credit, like a lending club or a sofa prosper or prosper.
Yeah. Like any one of those upgrades or any one of those that, partnered with. And not all of them that are partnered with credit. Karma is awesome. I’m not endorsing them, but what is my point? You can have them do a soft pole, and they will give you an idea right. Of what you could probably qualify for now, it’s not guaranteed, but if all those potential offers from, SoFi and upgrade and lending club, yeah.
They are all coming back, and they’re saying, congratulations, we’ll give you 2000. You have 50 grand in debt. Congratulations. We’ll give you $2,000 at 32% interest or something like that. So that gives you an idea of where you’re at legitimately. So if you get an offer in the mail, that’s, oh, we got you three and a half percent unsecured.
Just freaking bullshit there. You’re not. You don’t even need to call. You can use credit karma and get there, Use that to go out there, and you can get an idea of where you’re going to be at for a legitimate consolidation loan. So yeah. If you qualify at all, sometimes you come back and bro, seriously.
No, I’m paraphrasing, you know what the response is, but it sounds like that swing in a miss. Yeah. . But it would if you’re at that credit level where they’re offering you loans at 20%, 25%, 30%, no legitimate lender is going to come in at three and a half to 5% when everybody else is, yeah, we might consider you at 30%.
We’re a buyer. Uhuh, it’s not going to happen. Don’t even bother calling. You’re not going to get a three-and-a-half percent consolidation loan, final word. Is that your last word? Damon? I think it should be because it was, is pretty good. It was very good. I really like the intonation there at the end.
Yeah. That’s. I’m here for the relief. Hey, another episode debt free dudes. I hope it wasn’t too serious for you. We’re trying to talk some honest stuff to you and ensure you don’t get scammed. Thank you very much, Damon. If you want to talk to that guy, Damon day.com. If you want to talk to me about that, just go to Damon.
Yeah. I know stuff. Yeah. All right, Damon. Thanks. Peace, Peace.