Questioner: Jean
Category: Collections Law
Private: No

Subject: collections lawsuit
Question: QUESTION: I am being sued for a credit card debt and need to file a response to the court to buy time, but don't have much time to respond. I am considering bankruptcy so this is probably the first of many, but need to gather my money to hire an attorney. What do I need to say to the court in a response letter. If I am willing to settle for like $25/month, should I say this here. Do you have a form letter I can send to the court nad attorney to buy me some time? the debt is mine, amongst others and I am in this mess due to the loss of equity on my home and I am unable to make these payments with everything else going on. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

ANSWER: You should use creditwrench on them instead of bankruptcy because creditwrench does exactly the same thing for a lot less money and does it much more effectively. It also does it without leaving a mark on your credit reports and on top of that you get paid instead of paying out all that money for nothing. Bankruptcy don't necessarily make them go away but creditwrench does just that.

So why file bankruptcy?

One does not send letters to the court to respond to a summons. What one does is prepare a defense in the proper format so that it looks like it was prepared by a professional attorney instead of just a letter.

What do you say? You might want to prepare a graduated denial in response to the summons and then follow that up with interrogatories, admissions and demand for production of documents.

Learn how to win the collections game instead of being the loser.

Bill Bauer
495-684-9297

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: I was served for this lawsuit for a claim of $5K and it says I must respond within 20 days, so I assume I have to send them something now. Do you have an example of a graduated denial letter that I could send.

Tell me more about creditwrench and if it is really an option. I have ~$50K in credit card debt, a high mortgage and car payment with nothing left to pay that credit card debt. My only option I thought would be bankruptcy or lose everything and be paying a ton in legal fees...

Answer: Creditwrench teaches people what their rights are under the law and how to actually make the debt collectors and their attorneys obey the law or pay the consequences of their without having to hire an attorney to defend them or their rights.

How we do that depends on where you are in the debt collection process.
We sometimes get people who have not even defaulted on their obligations but due to a change in their incomes or health or other problems in their life they know they are soon going to be unable to meet the obligations they once thought they could meet easily. Nobody wants to be a deadbeat and skip out on the obligations they lawfully owe but when things go bad due to circumstances beyond their control they have to do something to save what they have.

Others come to us because of mortgage foreclosure problems. Those who come to creditwrench early are especially lucky because they have the opportunity to learn how to deal with abusive debt collectors early on.

Then at the other end of the spectrum we have people who contact us a few days before they have to go to court to answer a summons and complaint. They lost many of their opportunities to learn how to win in court and have to deal with their situation and sometimes within a matter of hours.

Your situation is similar to that above. You have only a few days before you have to respond to a summons and complaint and you not only have no idea of how to go about it but you also have no idea of how much paperwork it is going to take to put up a viable defense.

Here is what you need just for starters to put up a viable defense. First of all you have to learn how to properly prepare court documents for filing. Then you have to prepare and present a response to the summons and complaint that the court will hopefully listen to. And you are going to have to send a copy of your response to the plaintiff's attorney by certified mail and it has to be accompanied by a document known as a certificate of mailing.

I had a new student this morning who had two days left within which to
file his response or get a default judgment against him. We started teaching him how to do that last evening and by this morning he was ready to go file his response. Total time he spent doing that was about 2 hours. Tomorrow we will work on his interrogatories, admissions and demand for the production of documents which he will also send to the plaintiff's attorney by certified mail, return receipt requested and a certificate of mailing will also go along with that. He already knows how to prepare those, of course and it won't take him more than about 10 minutes to prepare each new one he needs in the future without help.

Then we will start to work on other possible motions to file with the court and he will also have to learn how to file a federal lawsuit against the plaintiff's attorney for violation of federal law. That can take much more time and how much time will largely depend on how much time he has to devote to it according to his other obligations such as his job and his family.

Students need much, much more help and coaching than they ever realize when they start out and there is no limit to how much personal coaching they can get from me.

They learn so much in a few weeks that they are probably better prepared to fight their own battles than most attorneys will ever be.
They will learn that when they take the attorneys and collection agencies to federal court they will be able to force the plaintiff in the local court to forget about the local case and dismiss it or if a judgment has been rendered they will have to get it vacated and removed from the student's record or pay a heavy price in federal court for failing or refusing to do so. They will usually be far more willing to do that than to have to face a federal judge and jury and explain why they broke the law. I've never ran into any who were foolish enough to try that yet.

I do hope that helps you to understand how it can be that creditwrench
gets the same job done as bankruptcy does yet leaves no public or credit bureau records to haunt them for years to come.

Labels: Business, Collection agency, Credit card debt, Credit history, Debt Consolidation, Financial Planning, Financial Services, Foreclosure

Hillary won big against Bam Bam (Obama) in yesterday's only primary. While it was most certainly an impressive margin of victory it hardly indicates that the tide has changed
for Hillary. She would almost have to take all the remaining primaries by equally wide margins and that isn't going to happen.

Bam Bam Obama is still set to win the nomination.

Labels: Barack Obama, Candidate, Candidates and Campaigns, Hillary, Hillary Clinton, Politics, Society and Culture, United States

My wife is being sued for a medical bill not paid for in Florida. The bill was for Feb 2003, for having her son. She had insurance at the time and her sons father had it as well. Now we live in North Carolina and she was served last week (4/20) for $2000.00 and has to be in court on 6/4 in Florida. We all feel she shouldn't pay since the insurance and we never received a bill or collection notice until being served by a police officer the other day. What do we do?

Answer: I can well understand your feelings over the billing problem resulting in your getting a summons but now you need to look at it the same way the court will look at it.

The court has only one interest and that is getting their docket cleared. That will only happen when the court has rendered it's verdict.
Most of the time the verdict is that the defendant owes the money the plaintiff claims is owed and the attorney gets his pay.

It is up to you to either let them do it to you or put up a credible defense to the plaintiff's complaint. So what will your defense be? Will you claim you don't owe the money? Will you claim that the insurance company is the one they should sue and not you?

That won't work because your wife and stepson did get the treatments and care and that can be proven. The medical facility is covered because the agreement signed at the time of treatment said that if the insurance didn't pay she or someone would be responsible for payment of the bill.

If the insurance company didn't pay when they were supposed to that is between you and the insurance company, not between you and the hospital. They don't care who pays, just so they get paid. So it seems that you have no defense against their claim. That means that they will get a judgment no matter what you do or say. You can and should attempt to delay the process to the greatest extent possible.

You do that by filing a response to the court within the time allotted you by the summons. So what will your response be? Will you prepare the response so it will be acceptable to the court or will you waste even more money by hiring an attorney who can do you little or no good
because you don't have a defense?

Of course you could just pay the debt and be done with it if you have the funds to do that but if you don't then you might want to think about alternatives to paying the debt.

It is common knowledge that the best defense is a strong offense and that is what you need to resolve your problem. If you want to keep from getting a judgment against you and your wages garnished or your bank accounts frozen and garnished or property seized to pay the debt then you need a strong offense rather than thinking about a defense which really doesn't exist.

You need to start the offense by first of all going to the courthouse and asking to see all the paperwork in the case. Check to see if there are other documents that you didn't get when you were served.

You will want to pay special attention to any affidavits that might be in the paperwork. If there are any they are usually fertile grounds for formulating a strong offense because they usually contain false and misleading information or are improperly written so as to qualify for affidavit status under the rules of procedure.

If an affidavit is present who was the notary that stamped the affidavit in what state are they authorized to be a notary? If not your own state, why not? Why would a local company go to some other state to find a notary to sign the affidavit? Maybe the debt was bought by a debt collector and now you have a false and fictitious plaintif who is not the party of first interest in the case.

If there is no affidavit then who is going to show up at the trial and does the affiant have first hand knowledge about the treatments and medications your wife and stepson received so she can ask them questions about that or about why they didn't file a timely claim with the insurance company so they could have been paid promptly?

Are there any false or misleading statements in the documents? If so then you might want to think about filing a federal lawsuit against the attorney. You can't file a federal case against the hospital so it would have to be against the attorney for the hospital because he is a 3rd party debt collector.

Maybe you have a statute of limitations defense. When was your stepson born and what state do you live in? If they waited too long to file the lawsuit then you can use a statute of limitations defense. If they waited too long you can win the case easily and then sue them for misrepresenting the legal status of the debt.

Finding their violations of the law is the key to mounting a strong enough offense to make them want to forget about getting any money out of you and maybe even paying you for your time and trouble.

Filing a proper response to the court for the least possible cost then follow that up with interrogatories, admissions and demand for production of documents is the only realistic way to go about preparing your defense and a strong offense.

So what are you going to do now? Pay up and be done with it or waste money on an attorney or start learning how to defend and hopefully come up with a good strong offense in the process? You tell me.

Bill Bauer
405-684-9297
405-227-9423
ceo@creditwrench.com

Creditwrench message forum
sued
court
hospital
suedoffense
insurance company
police officer
lawsuit
affidavit
bank accounts
North Carolina
law
statute of limitations
collection agency
Florida

Hillary Clinton is now just about dead meat in the 2008 presidential race. She lost the North Carolina primaries and won the Indiana primary by a very small margin. That means that unless she can somehow pull a political rabbit out of the hat by changing her stance on important political issues by a sufficient amount to change how the super delegates view her platform she can't possibly get the Democratic nomination. It is highly unlikely that she can do that.

So now it appears to be a two horse race. But whether or not Hillary will actually pull out of the race and endorse Obama as the Democratic candidate remains to be seen.

So at this time all indications point to its having been reduced to a two horse race between Obama and McCain.

If that be the case then our indicators are currently telling us that Obama will be our next President.

Labels: Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Indiana, North Carolina, Presidential Election of 2008, United States

It is now obvious that unless Sen. Clinton pulls off a whole series of stunning victories in the few remaining states yet to hold their primaries she has no chance of winning the nomination. That widely held media view hasn't deterred her determination in the least however. There could be at least two or more theories behind her apparent determination. One might be that she is simply too dumb to know when she is beaten but another could be that she is staying in for the sole purpose of showing the public that she isn't a quitter. That could benefit her greatly in the event she runs again in 2012.

On a side note, Rev. Jeremiah Wright is no longer the pastor of Obama's Church.

It also seems that the media hasn't become overly enthusiastic about the elections and are downplaying it in favor of other news. The coverage of other things such as the possibility of an upcoming new war with Iran. That seems almost inevitable at this point in time. Some have claimed that we would attack Iran as early as last Sunday but they were obviously wrong since talks with Iran are still going on. That may be very short lived however. Other pundits have claimed that we will attack Iran no later than the 1st of June and others predict a date no later than July 1st. Let us hope that all are wrong and Iran ends up caving in thus saving us from yet another disaster in the Gulf.

The Creditwrench message forum isn't the only place people are talking about false affidavits being filed in courts. Edelman &Combs lawfirm class action lawsuit against TSYS also talks about Maisha Davis who is an employee of the NAN (National Attorney Network) started by TSYS of Georgia that supplies attorneys with false and misleading affidavits to use against consumers who have fallen on hard times.

A creditwrench student filed suit against Howard Lee Schiff alleging the same complaints against Schiff who offered Plaintiff Maderios a crazy settlement offer claiming that they had really done nothing wrong. Their so called offer was quickly rejected by the Plaintiff who then beefed up his complaint considerably to what is shown in the above link.

The class action lawsuit won't get heard until sometime in December of 2008 but the Maderios case will be settled long before that.

Despite the highly publicized win of Hillary Clinton in the Pennsylvania primary election, Barak Obama's lead over Hillary obviously widened by a wee bit. While the media seemingly failed to note the difference the general public tended to ignore Hillary's Pennsylvania win by continuing to support Obama.

Meanwhile, the media seems to believe that popularity of the Democrats and Republicans is about equal, the public simply doesn't agree with that either. While once again the margins are indeed small and the Democrats failed to gain any ground over the Republicans this week they still have the edge over the Republicans in terms of popularity.

That simply means that if Hillary hopes to win the nomination she is not only going to have to improve her stances and find better ways to overcome the fact that at this time she is an obvious loser. Of course, anything can happen and the exact outcome of the primaries and both conventions are yet wide open. McCain will almost unquestionably win the Republican nomination but the outcome of the Democratic convention is yet to be revealed.

I've never written about politics before but since the elections are heating up just a bit I've decided to start checking things out and trying to come up with some projections on what the outcome of the 2008 elections might be.

Since it is obvious that neither the media nor the public has truly decided which party is most likely to prevail as of yet it will be totally impossible to accurately predict who the next president will be at this time so until that issue is decided we can only compare candidates.

Just as I use some rather unorthodox methods to beat up on debt collectors and their lawyers, I also use some rather unorthodox methods to determine what the public is thinking on any given issue, political or otherwise.

Since it appears that at the present time the Democrats seem to have a very slight edge over the Republicans I will look at who the most popular Republican candidates are as time goes on.

Right now there are only two Republicans in the race since all the others have dropped out. Those two are John McCain and Ron Paul. This is a race that seems to have extremely diverse opinions between what the media is thinking and what the public is thinking. We are all aware that the media is heavily touting John McCain as the only viable Republican in the race and they don't consider Ron Paul as even being in the race but the general public seems to have an entirely different opinion. It seems that in the minds of the public Ron Paul is wildly more popular than John McCain. It would, of course be a disaster for the media if Ron Paul were to actually upset McCain at the Republican convention and it is doubtful that such a thing will happen but what if it does?

On the Democratic side the race is obviously between Obama and Clinton. Clinton had a decisive edge over Obama until the new year rolled in but Obama now has enjoyed a huge lead over Clinton throughout 2008 and it will take a major upset to change that picture. That isn't likely to happen since both the media and the public seem to be in agreement on that matter.

Since the current trend is that the Democrats have a slight edge over the Republicans
at the present time it seems more likely that Obama may well be our next president than not.

Labels: Barack Obama, Democratic Party, John McCain, Politics, Republican National Convention, Republican Party, Ron Paul, United States