519-646-2222Ontario’s “New” Debt Forgiveness Programme
Here’s how it works
First of all, you must be in debt and worried about your situation or it won’t work at all. In fact the more worried you are the better the scheme, er, programme, works.
Let’s assume you are getting threatening letters from collectors or from law offices – you’ll be prime for the picking. Advertisements are all over the internet for the “New Government Programmes” some law offices are even in on the easy money scheme.
You call them up – perhaps believing because they put themselves out as a law firm that they have ethics. Ethics and law can be mutually exigible terms and often are.
You might be sent an application form that appears to be legit and it probably is, for the service that you will be provided. Chances are you never read through all the forms and even if you did you never understood what they said. You simply trusted the salesperson.
It all sounds very tempting, so you sign on to pay $185.00 per month for a period of 24 months for the firm to “take care of your debts”. In fact, they have promised to work towards “settling your debts for pennies on the dollar”. Wow!
You agree to set up a preauthorized payment plan and make your monthly payments. Later you learn that after you have ceased paying your bills for two years the Statute of Limitations runs out and the creditors can no longer sue you. The fee for letting the clock run out was a mere $4,440.00 – but you really didn’t need to pay the money you could have stopped paying your bills without any help, maybe you already had.
Oh well you’ve paid the money what now? Well you may be advised that your creditors cannot do anything about the bills so you don’t need to pay them – just tell them that you are protected by a “Statute Bar”. You are protected, but only to a point. You still owe the debts and the collection calls may not stop for several more years, your credit report will be impacted for quite a while too.
But now that the debts are Statute Barred and the collectors have few options to collect they will be more likely to settle your debts for pennies on the dollar. The only thing is you will need to put up additional funds for the settlement.