John Anthony Hartman

Help my  money has fallen and I can’t get up.

The perils of the economic landscape of banking an finance has created and bust like none in a generation and the digital natives are looking at the boomers and gen-Xer’s  going whoa! The MONEY ship struck the iceberg someone call Cameron and get Leo and Kate to the front of the boat because we are all going down.

This has been the sentiment from the mass “hysteria” media and something we all felt in our 401k’s and worse yet foreclosure. So now the dust has settled a bit or the life rafts are full. What do we do as a post internet culture ? The best question however is how do we help the most effected and how to handle and manage our credit score in 2009.

I found this nice call to action to the banking industry to understand the web 2.0ishness of the state of the web from back in 2007 but it is still a good start for any financial industry conversation.

I hope you are not here but if you are going through bankruptcy you should know this. After the U.S. Congress passed the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005, the Executive Office for United States Trustees (EOUST) was charged with coordinating the development of a list of approved providers of credit counseling and debtor education courses. http://www.usdoj.gov/jmd/mps/manual/eoust.htm

I also found this very interesting for those going through bankruptcy. According to a 2009 survey, consumers who received pre-bankruptcy counseling exhibited significantly improved credit profiles in as little as two years when compared to consumers who did not receive pre-bankruptcy counseling. Of the clients who received pre-filing bankruptcy counseling, 15.2 percent were able to avoid filing bankruptcy due to the counseling and resources received. http://www.nbkrc.com/news.aspx

Consumers who entered a debt management plan had a significantly lower incidence of bankruptcy filing
Pre-BAPCPA Credit Counseling Clients – 28.9% vs 19.8%.
Post-BAPCPA Credit Counseling Clients - 30.4% vs 17.3%.
Post-BAPCPA Pre-BK Clients – 92.5% vs 58.2%.
Of the clients who received pre-filing bankruptcy counseling, 84.8 percent went on to file for bankruptcy and 15.2 percent did not file bankruptcy during the study period.
Credit counseled consumers who filed for bankruptcy had lower dismissal rates in comparison to the national sample for both Chapter 7 (1.6 percent vs. 2.1 percent) and Chapter 13 (30.9 percent vs. 44.6 percent) filings.

An organization who has come to my attention that is doing a lot in this area is Money Management International (MMI).
With a $16 million grant from NeighborWorks America - the largest grant amount awarded to a housing counseling agency working to support the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 - MMI offers free counseling to families at risk of losing their homes through the National Foreclosure Mitigation Counseling Program. This program is designed to help consumers understand the complex foreclosure process, review their options and identify a possible course of action, and make informed decisions. http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS187293+22-Jan-2009+BW20090122

The process of educating and mitigation of the needless foreclosure and or bankruptcy needs to be forefront of the discourse on the stimulus recovery activities we as a world are facing. It is time for the consumer to evolve and take back control of our financial futures and work with educators and experts to create the fastest economic rebound in world history. We are primed to retool our economies and our personal financial futures through the leveraging of technological innovations as well as the human where with all that has seen us through two world wars and the original depression.

Buck up and take charge of your tomorrow. Evolve with the digital world or stand in analog static forever.