Life after Bankruptcy
Posted: Fri Aug 24, 2007 2:39 pm
One of my clients made some terrible business (overpaying employees) and personal decisions (buying a house on 80/20 financing while recovering from the bad business decision, taking numerous vacations, and generally not pulling even a 6 hour day) and he had to claim bankruptcy. I would like to note that we would have advised him against these decisions if he had told us about them before it was too late.
I saw a charge come through his account today for "Increase Your Credit Score". When I asked him about it, it said it was for a seminar on how to recover from a bankruptcy. He added that they promised that within 2.5 years, he would be a homeowner again (which I don't believe for a second. Even if he gets his outrageous spending under control, he still doesn't pull in the income to support a mortgage). Apparently, the initial seminar was free, but the "continuation" is not. I don't "do" seminars or anything, so this could be normal.
My scam-dar is going off a little. Partly because my client is a moron and has fallen for other scams before and partly because they're making promises that they shouldn't be making.
Best I can figure it is that the seminar is put out by "After Bankruptcy Foundation, Inc." which is a non-profit corp in Indiana and Stephen Snyder is the figurehead. The website is at http://www.lifeafterbankruptcy.com/. On the "About Stephen" page there are numerous quotes from the media, but of the links provided all of them are PDFs located on ABF's website. There's no off-site links. I was able to quickly verify some of them though. In the Quicken article, for instance, it looked like they asked him some questions only in connection with how to raise your score - and nothing on how to manage your finances.
The testimonials on AFB's site reek of "get your score back up so you can start acquiring debt you can't pay" and not "You helped me manage my spending and get my score back up so I can afford the home of my dreams" or anything like that.
Has anyone heard anything either good or bad about this? There's not much I can do to pull my client out of this scheme at this point (once he's been suckered into something, there's no talking to him about it until he's ready to admit defeat), but I'd like to have an idea about what to expect.
I saw a charge come through his account today for "Increase Your Credit Score". When I asked him about it, it said it was for a seminar on how to recover from a bankruptcy. He added that they promised that within 2.5 years, he would be a homeowner again (which I don't believe for a second. Even if he gets his outrageous spending under control, he still doesn't pull in the income to support a mortgage). Apparently, the initial seminar was free, but the "continuation" is not. I don't "do" seminars or anything, so this could be normal.
My scam-dar is going off a little. Partly because my client is a moron and has fallen for other scams before and partly because they're making promises that they shouldn't be making.
Best I can figure it is that the seminar is put out by "After Bankruptcy Foundation, Inc." which is a non-profit corp in Indiana and Stephen Snyder is the figurehead. The website is at http://www.lifeafterbankruptcy.com/. On the "About Stephen" page there are numerous quotes from the media, but of the links provided all of them are PDFs located on ABF's website. There's no off-site links. I was able to quickly verify some of them though. In the Quicken article, for instance, it looked like they asked him some questions only in connection with how to raise your score - and nothing on how to manage your finances.
The testimonials on AFB's site reek of "get your score back up so you can start acquiring debt you can't pay" and not "You helped me manage my spending and get my score back up so I can afford the home of my dreams" or anything like that.
Has anyone heard anything either good or bad about this? There's not much I can do to pull my client out of this scheme at this point (once he's been suckered into something, there's no talking to him about it until he's ready to admit defeat), but I'd like to have an idea about what to expect.