Be Intentional About Life

Client Advice: all debts in collections. snowball order still the best?

Hey fellow finance nerds. I was hoping to get another opinion about a new client I'm meeting with. Long story short, they tried a debt 'settlement' program two years ago and as a result all accounts are in collections. They came to me because they finally got sued on the biggest debt.

In this case do you think the classic debt-snowball "smallest-to-largest" technique is the best order to try to wake these guys up and settle them? Unfortunately the debt 'settlement' company sent "cease and desist" letters to all of them a long time ago so it's either lawsuit or nothing on the communication front. The great news is they have strong cash-flow and enough savings to start knocking some out right away!

So here are the options:

- smallest to largest waking one up at a time

- largest to smallest (order of likely suits)

- start talking to a subset of them to hopefully head-off more lawsuits which are undoubtedly pending.

Tags: coaching, debt, settlement

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Permalink Reply by GREGG PECHMANN on September 9, 2010 at 6:35pm

Ok ....
how much is the largest suit? If they can come up with a plan on that one where they can afford to pay it, then do it. First, deal with the immediate triage to avoid any more damage with the big one. Once this one is taken care of, then wake up the smaller debts, one at a time and pay one at a time off for now. If he can afford to pay on more than one, then resume the debt snowball on those
Now , if these smaller ones start coming after your client while he is paying off the largest debt (the one he is getting sued by), than go on to plan B and try to come up with a payment program for the smaller ones to keep them at bay....

But for now, keep the small dogs sleeping for now until the big boy is dealt with.....

make sense?

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Permalink Reply by Deacon Bradley on September 9, 2010 at 10:01pm

Yea that makes sense. The largest suite is around 10K and that one was settled between the consultation and our first meeting (tomorrow). Since I believe one of the other large ones (truck repo at 8K) has sent him a letter that a lawsuit is on it's way so I imagine we'll be ready for that one.

The tricky part in my opinion is that because of the cease-and-desist letters we don't have much warning about what's going on on their end. That's why I was considering going largest to smallest because the small ones they'll be able to cash-flow easily (they have excellent cash flow), and the big ones I figure are more likely to be suing shortly!

Thanks a ton for your advice Gregg! I'm super excited for this couple's progress!

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Permalink Reply by GREGG PECHMANN on September 10, 2010 at 5:25am

Glad to help....anytime my friend

Deacon Bradley said:

Yea that makes sense. The largest suite is around 10K and that one was settled between the consultation and our first meeting (tomorrow). Since I believe one of the other large ones (truck repo at 8K) has sent him a letter that a lawsuit is on it's way so I imagine we'll be ready for that one.

The tricky part in my opinion is that because of the cease-and-desist letters we don't have much warning about what's going on on their end. That's why I was considering going largest to smallest because the small ones they'll be able to cash-flow easily (they have excellent cash flow), and the big ones I figure are more likely to be suing shortly!

Thanks a ton for your advice Gregg! I'm super excited for this couple's progress!