HELP! Where to start...

IB: Claims are cheap... Collection agencies and accounts working on a commission will SAY anything to get you to pay the money. I think everyone here would agree that you should ALWAYS get it in writing prior to sending any money. There are some creditors who will mark the accounts paid as agreed or delete the tradeline from your credit reports, but you can also do this information directly. I can not caution you enough about working with these debt management companies who play the middleman. We've seen numerous times how they benefit the creditor, not the consumer and it makes it very difficult to recover from anytime soon....

 

IB
I just spidered the site and there is absolutely nothing on it whatsoever.
My spider will pull up anything on any site no matter whether you can see it from your browser.
It will pull up all of the text files, all of the cgi scripts, perl scripts, log files, secret password files, anything whatsoever is revealed and there is absolutely nothing on the site whatever.
The placeholder page that you see when you go there is put there by the webhost when the site is signedup for be it by a domain holder or a freebie site.

I have also checked all the major search engines and they all come up with zip, zero, zilch, nada too.

So until they get something up on their site, it's going to be a bit tough to figure out what it is that they might do for you.

What have you heard that they do that makes you want to find out more about them?

 

Folks, it's not MyVista.com. It's MyVista.org. They advertise pretty heavily in certain CNN and FoxNews rotations, reviewed favorably by Forbes, and mentioned in USA Today's listing of helpful financial sites last year (Janet Kornblum's columns are available at USAToday.com but I don't know how far back). In short, it's a well-known organization and web site which has evidently helped quite a few happy clients. Here's an easy link:

http://www.myvista.org

Doc

P.S. Apologies to Bill's "spider"...

 

CBA plan?
Does that mean you still have to pay the debts?

If so why on earth would you want to do that when you can just get rid of the debts without paying them off and with any degree of luck at all make the bill collector pay you?

Don't make no sense to me.

 

Yes, I saw it.
Now go check out my site and get out of debt for less than 1/5 that amount and if you need a psychiatrist or a psycologist then maybe psychdoc here on the board can help you with that and if you want budgeting programs I give those away for free to help you set up and operate a budget and make that work for you and lots of other free stuff too.

Their way you pay only $2900 up front and then all your bills with even more interest on top plus whatever else they can figure out to ding you for and my way you pay only $35 up front, get rid of your bills and maybe make the bill collector pay you if he violates your rights which they always do one way or another. Never seen one of them wolves fail yet. They always got more than enough feet to step off into it every time.

Think about it

My way only works if you have already defaulted on your bills. Their way may save you from defaulting on your bills. It just depends on what your situation is and what you want to do.

 

Bill, some people feel that it's a responsible and ethical thing to pay back borrowed money. Even though there are legal loopholes for solving the problem differently (and certainly your Creditwrench consultation meets those objectives quite well), that approach may not be a comfortable one for everyone. These are decisions that can only be made one person at a time and only after a careful (and usually painful) period of weighing the alternatives and their likely outcomes.

Doc

 

This is quite true doc. Problem often is that folks just happen to stumble into somebody's solution and it looks good to them as being a possible alternative to other options. On the other hand, maybe they have not known about other options that might fit them even better. If they don't have all the options before them then they can fall prey to a scheme that ends up almost being worse than death. I think Bkev and a few others use the word "rip-off" and for lack of education about all the possible options they end up choosing one that hurts them more than it helps them.

I think we should all be interested in teaching others about all the options that we know of and helping them in that way to reach an informed decision as to what is best for them.

The option I offer is no good at all if they are not in a position where the wolf is always at their door or every time their telephone rings, it's the wolf howling at them again.

So everybody has to decide for themselves, but I for one see nothing wrong with at least informing them that there may be other options out there they should also look at.

$2900 up front just to start is a whale of a lot of money considering that the $2900 up front fee is just the starter and they still have to deal with the wolf.

By the time they get there, seems to me they would be very much in need of your expertise.

 

IB -
I know what you mean by not wanting to answer the phone. I did that for months, but all it did was piss them off to the point where they didn't want to work with me at all. Once I started talking, they started trying to come up with ideas to help, and MOST weren't nearly as nasty anymore.

 

LOL, true. Also, I heartily endorse your effective solution for anyone who has reviewed their options. (In my last message, I was just responding to your "don't make no sense to me" comment, lol. For some, it may make good sense to pay back borrowed money.) I personally think IB would benefit by simply having a conversation with you about those options. Finally, I agree that paying $2,900 up front is an incredible amount to ask someone in that position to pay. For that reason alone, I would NOT select myvesta.org. If I deemed debt repayment best but was drowning, I would first attempt to renegotiate "hardship" APRs and payment plans individually, and if that didn't work, I would seek out the non-profit CCCS.

Doc

 

Well, we are preparing the output from the spider on their site right now. It comes out in ASCII format and then we run it through an ASCII to HTML converter which prepares the file and turns all the links into clickable links and puts it in form where you know what you are clicking on then we run it through an html checker which checks to make sure all the syntax is correct and then we can put the finished product up on the website and I'll run a link to it so we can all see what is on their site. Every single solitary file on it.

That will also help IB to make a decision on whether or not she wants to deal with them. The file and the links will reveal everything on the site. We will remove all the links to css sheets, cgi and other scripts and the finished product will only contain links to browser viewable webpages both on and off their site. No matter where the link goes, it will have been verified as good and ready to click and read.

What most of these kinds of sites do is to have a lot of stuff hidden from the consumer until such a time as they have paid their $2900 or whatever and they are stuck. By running the spider on the site we are able to bring all the tricks and traps to light and thereby be in a better position to inform the consumer so they make the best possible decision for their situation and comfort levels no matter what those may be.

It's all about consumer education, not hype and BS. Get rid of a few layers of hype and crowing and BS and tell the truth and the whole thing often is not what it was made out to be at all.

 

IB:
Here is what comes up.
A listing of everything on the myvesta.com website.
It's a huge file and you are not ever going to click on all the links because they not only cover all the webpages on the site but all the stuff they link to in all of their pages.

It's a real indepth study and will tell you everything you want to know about them and what they do and a lot of stuff you didn't want to know.

you can find it at http://www.creditwrench.com/myvesta.html

I do hope it helps you to decide if their program will or will not meet your needs

 

Debt negoiation companies don't tell you one important point. The cc companies by law must issue a 1099C on any settlement over $600. The IRS will consider the difference between the amount owed and the amount settled as taxable income. Now, you may have one out. If you can prove you are insolvent on the date of the settlement you will owe no taxes.
My honest opinion is, you may be better off in bk. A good Bk lawyer will be able to strip away that 2nd mortgage and place it in an unsecured position right along with the cc debt and medical bills. Anyway, whatever you decide-Good Luck!

 

I was not aware that the creditors had to report settlement differences as you say they do. I have never seen one do it yet, but that don't mean they don't do it. I just thought that was a threat some of them used to try to get the debtor to pay up in full. I don't doubt your word at all. I just didn't know it was a requirement in law. If it was a requirement in IRS law that they do that then it would seem to me that a bank who lost say $20,000 on a house mortgage would surely know enough about IRS law to know they had to file 1099 C on all their failed mortgages, don't you think? Why is it then that the IRS don't go after those who get 1099-C forms filed on them? I filed 12 of them on one old boy and he's sitting in jail right now waiting trial on income tax evasion charges. They went looking at his books on my filing 1099-C and they found out there was a whole lot more wrong than my 1099-c filings he didn't report. I seriously doubt they would have thrown him in jail just because I filed 1099 on him but they sure went to find out why he didn't fess up.

I'm not saying you are wrong by any stretch of the imagination, because I don't have the foggiest idea if you are right or wrong, but if there is a law saying banks and CCs have to turn it in then why is it they don't ever do it and if they don't ever do it how do they get away without doing it. Seems to me like if there was some kind of law like that saying they had to do it the IRS would realize that actually forcing them to do it would bring them in a whole bunch of money more than they are getting now and it would get the CCs and the banks a whole lot more collections because the people would soon get scared to death of what was going to happen to them when the bank filed 1099 on them.

I know the creditors can't claim it on their income tax and get a write off unless they paid taxes on all the 1099 forms they filed, I can sure see all the creditors rushing to pay IRS the taxes on all the failed contracts and debts they didn't collect any money on.

I know they can file a 1099-c on the debtor and I can understand it if IRS wishes they would, but what I don't know anything about is if there is a law requiring them to do so, because if they had to do it by law and they never did it then that would leave the the creditor in an awful mean situation under some circumstances.

I also know that there are a whole bunch of different things that 1099-C covers. It's not just forgiveness of debt although I don't know all of the possible uses for 1099-C. Never bothered ot look it up or study it, but when you call up the IRS and ask for some copies of 1099-C they send you out a whole big package of stuff and they are a kind of a rose colored form and they have a box in the upper left hand corner telling one how that particular form is to be used.

Interesting subject you brought up and hope you or someone who knows a whole lot more than I do about it can enlighten us on the subject. There just might be a whole lot more uses for the information than what's been thought of so far.