Article Navigation

Dealing With Debt

To deal with debt several steps are needed to prepare yourself to deal effectively with your creditors. Your game plan will depend on the analysis which you will carry out. So take time to ensure that the information you gather is accurate and that you are completely clear about your priorities. If you are not the organised type, the process of getting organised might seem to be tedious and irrelevant, but nothing could be further from the truth - if you can't quickly locate information you need, or find out what was said or agreed on a particular occasion, you will be making your task difficult if not impossible. Many creditors rely on the disorganisation of the average person to allow them to extract commitments they are not entitled to or to move them into other actions which are not in their best interests. Record-keeping and presentation are important, and the more professional you can make yourself appear, the more likely you are to obtain what you want in your dealings with creditors. The impression which you will be trying to create in the minds of the people with whom you will be dealing is that of someone who knows his or her way around and must be dealt with carefully. A competent, well-informed individual with reasonable future prospects, who just happens to have a temporary financial issue. If you can convince people that this is the type of person you are, the amount of leeway they will give you will be very different from what you could expect if you are perceived as a poor money manager or someone sinking rapidly. If you can convince yourself that this is in fact the case, you are well on the way to recovery. It is important to remember that you are always dealing with people, not the company or institution they represent. They may try to give the impression that they are disinterested functionaries of a bureaucratic machine who are bound by immutable rules, but as people they are open to persuasion (within limits) and to a certain amount of manipulation, and there is almost always some leeway in the way in which rules can be interpreted and the interest rates can usually be negotiated. Most people you have contact with will usually respond in kind to a firm, reasonable approach with a touch of ironic humour if appropriate (but do not overdo the humour as it could be taken as making light of the problem). It is often surprising how much latitude can be available in a situation previously presented as inflexible, if you can make some kind of personal contact with the people involved.