Posted On: June 16, 2014

No one wants to go bankrupt. It is the last resort when faced with insurmountable financial problems. But even if your payments are in arrears and you are getting collection calls, there are other options besides a bankruptcy, which we at Richard Killen & Associates are glad to explain. These include:

Getting a Consolidation Loan
If you can qualify for a consolidation loan, you can bundle all your debts into a single package and make a  monthly payment that will probably be lower than what you are faced with right now with all the individual payments. You can usually reduce interest and stretch out your repayment period. The trick is qualifying for the loan if your credit rating has taken a beating because of your financial difficulties. To get approved, you may need collateral, or a co-signor or guarantor – not always easy to find.

Making an Informal Arrangement

You can, perhaps, negotiate with creditors to reduce monthly payments. Or you might be able to get them to accept less than the full amount owed, if you have a lump sum payment you can make. In either case, you should use the services of a licensed trustee, lawyer, accountant or reputable credit counselling agency to do this, and beware of the many unscrupulous sorts out there poised to take advantage of your situation. Other pitfalls of this method include: the high degree of difficulty in conducting negotiations; creditors who can still sue you; no protection from garnishees; it doesn’t stop interest accumulation; and it needs to be accepted by all creditors before it can be effective.

Offering a Consumer Proposal
A consumer proposal is a legally binding agreement between you and your unsecured creditors to settle all your unsecured debts. It is filed with the government and managed by a licensed trustee, such as Richard Killen & Associates, under the supervision of the court. You will probably wind up paying back only a portion of what you owe – for instance 10, 20, or 30 per cent – and so get the debt relief you need without going bankrupt.

How this differ from the  two options above? The three main advantages are:

1. You don’t have to negotiate with each creditor separately.
2. You only need a simple majority of the debts to be in favour, not all of them, to get it accepted.
3. The creditors have to listen  to you. If they ignore your offer they will be stuck with it, so you will have their attention.

In other words, you will be negotiating a settlement of all you unsecured debts from a position of more-or-less equality with your creditors. We usually don’t think of ourselves as being in that position with the banks and credit card companies, do we?

A proposal also stops all interest charges, halts lawsuits and garnishees, and does not require direct individual negotiations (the trustee handles this for you).

Everyone’s situation is different. To decide what is the best method of dealing with your debt problems, you need expert advice. At Richard Killen & Associates we offer a free assessment consultation, so you will have a clear picture of what your options are.

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People often ask, what is a consumer proposal what is the consumer proposal meaning or definition and how similar is it to a debt consolidation loan? A proposal is like a consolidation loan where your payments are made affordable and downgraded into a single monthly payment term. You can make the payments to a trustee who accumulates them and pays the money out to your creditors every six months.

Consumer Proposal Meaning & Consumer Proposal Definition

A proposal is a debt settlement agreement that you can do with a Licensed Insolvency Trustee.

The thing about it is that it does not necessarily involve paying back 100 percent of what is owed to the creditors. Many times the total amount owed can be reduced by 50% or more. It involves making a new deal with creditors so that they get paid to the best of your ability.

The major difference between an informal arrangement with creditors and a proposal is that the latter has the protections that are built into the law. You are protected by the law until it is determined that the creditors will or will not accept your proposal. They still have the option of turning you down but no one can take legal action against you. However, if you are under an informal agreement, the creditor who does not approve with the arrangement can still sue you, garnishee your pay and seize your assets.

What happens in the proposal?

A consumer proposal can be a solution to avoid bankruptcy if you are having difficulties with your debt payments. Your trustee will review your situation with you and help you determine the best payment term for your financial problem. The settlement will depend on your income and personal assets. The term can cover an interest-free payment of up to 5 years which can lead to bigger savings. A consumer credit proposal can work with various unsecured debts such as bank loans, tax debt, and credit card debts as well as student loan debt.

How will you know that you are eligible for a consumer proposal?

First of all, you need to make sure that you can make payments for a portion of your debts. Secondly, your assets must be of lesser value than your debt which shows the reason why you are not able to keep up with the payments. You must also be a resident of Canada to qualify. Take note that a proposal is regulated by the federal government and you must comply with all of the requirements.

What are the benefits of Consumer Proposals?

Aside from being able to avoid bankruptcy, it can help you save money by reducing your debt by a significant amount and by stopping the interest rates. This way, you can keep your properties. You also do not have to make multiple payments—this will combine your debt into a single monthly payment. Besides, your creditors will have to follow your terms and stop wage garnishments. This is instant protection from the creditors and collection agencies who must stop chasing you for payment.

A CP can be the most effective solution for your financial situation. Legal consumer proposal services can only be provided by a Licensed Insolvency Trustee or a licensed consumer proposal administrator. They will help you understand your debt relief options and help you manage your debt problems. You can book a free consultation with a trustee.

Now that we have answered the question “What Is a consumer proposal?”, you now have a much better understanding of the consumer proposal meaning where you pay only a portion of the debt owed with no interest versus a debt consolidation loan where you pay back 100% of the debt owed, plus interest.

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Debt collectors can be, uh, zealous in their pursuit of money owed. Stories of daily phone calls, threats, bothering friends and relatives, and late-night contacts abound. In some cases debt collectors have aggressively pursued ridiculously small amounts of money, and even gone after people who owe nothing at all.

The point is, there are limits to what these agencies can do to collect cash. In Ontario, the Collections Agencies Act lays out the boundaries that, when crossed, constitute illegal harassment.

For example, a debt collector can’t make any calls to a debtor until six days after mailing written notice with the name of the creditor, balance owing on the debt and the identity of the collection agency.

They are also not allowed to make calls on statutory holidays, on Sundays, except between the hours of 1 and 5 p.m., or on any other day of the week between the hours of 9 p.m. and 7 a.m. And they cannot contact the person more than three times in a seven-day period.

If a debt collector does get you on the phone, they cannot threaten you, swear at you, lie to you or harass you. They cannot seize your assets until they have won a court judgment. They can only contact your employer to get your employment information, unless your employer has guaranteed your debt or the call is about a legal action, such as garnisheeing your wages.

And they can only contact your family, friends, neighbours and acquaintances once to get your address and phone number, unless these people have guaranteed your loan or you have given permission for them to be contacted (in a contract, most likely).

Read more about your rights dealing with collection agencies here.  While it’s generally better to speak to a collection agency, rather than avoid them, to deal with the problem, you don’t have to talk to them if you don’t want to.

If they do harass you or threaten you or try to intimidate you in some way, they may be breaking law. You have the right to report them to the police or phone company, or file a complaint to the Ministry of Consumer Affairs.

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“I owe, I owe, it’s off to work I go” is what Canadian are apparently singing to themselves these days.

A new survey conducted by credit rating agency Equifax Canada reveals that Canadians are groaning under record levels of debt: $1.422 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2013. This is up from $1.36 trillion in the third quarter and up 9.1 per cent compared to a year earlier.

Credit card debt was up almost six per cent, with Canadians owing $81.6 billion on their plastic pals. Mortgages make up the largest part of our debt load: 63.6 per cent, or $903.8 billion in the fourth quarter; this is followed by bank revolving loans and instalment loans: 17.6 per cent ($249.9 billion) and 8.8 per cent ($125 billion).

Research also shows that Canadians are able to handle the debt for now, with delinquencies at an all-time low. But some industry observers ask whether a lot of us are just paying minimum amounts on our debts – a strategy  that will crash and burn eventually.

“Usually it goes downhill from there, where people eventually can’t even make minimum payments as the interest creeps higher and higher. A vicious cycle,” says Laurie Campbell, executive director of Credit Canada, in a Financial Post article.

A very underused tool available to anyone with a problematic debt load is a consultation with a trustee. It costs nothing and usually provides a person with a realistic perspective and options that can really help see them through the forest. Even the Seven Dwarves (who probably didn’t have credit cards) needed to find their way through the forest.

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The fear of losing your home is a powerful one. When their finances go south, many imagine that bankruptcy will leave them homeless. Is this fear justified? Not really, or not in the normal course of a bankruptcy.

Yes, when you go bankrupt, you give control of your assets to a trustee in exchange for getting rid of your debts. This, in theory, could mean that the house gets sold to help pay back the creditors. But in practice this rarely happens, mainly because it is not in the best interests of everyone involved. The trustee has a lot of discretion, which he or she generally uses to safeguard the rights and interests of both the creditors and the debtor. Selling the house outright usually doesn’t achieve this purpose. So what normally happens?

Well, there are many different scenarios. If you have no realizable equity in the house – equity is the amount you’d get selling the house after deducting the mortgage and other associated costs – there is no point in  selling the house, because all the money would just go to pay off the mortgage(s). In this case you get to keep the house as long as you keep paying your mortgage. The trustee doesn’t get involved.

But, what if you did have some equity, say roughly $20,000? To keep the house, you would have to pay the trustee this amount, because that’s what the creditors would have received if the house had been sold. So the creditors end up getting their fair share and you keep your house.

Yes, but if you had $20,000 to throw around, you wouldn’t be bankrupt in the first place, right? Well, you would have to raise the money, but the trustee would work with you to accomplish this. For instance, you might be able to get the money through a second mortgage. Or you could work out a direct monthly payment plan with the trustee. In either case, you would keep your house.

Where things start to get more complicated is if you have a significant amount of equity in the home, let’s say $100,000. In order to hang onto the castle, you would have to pay the trustee 100 large – a whopping sum, but not impossible and financing is usually obtainable.

But, in such a case you probably would want to explore the legal alternative to bankruptcy: a consumer proposal. If you go this route, you don’t risk losing the house. You simply offer the creditors a settlement, negotiated by your trustee under the protection of the law. Most often this solution satisfies everyone because it pays the creditors an acceptable sum while allowing you to escape the debt quagmire in an orderly and manageable way: win-win.

There are a couple of other points to understand when you’re dealing with the house question.

The first  is that in all these scenarios the trustee will remind you of your right to get advice from a lawyer of your choice, someone who is there to protect specifically your interests. This is your basic legal right, but it becomes much more important if you have a lot of equity in your home. A good lawyer will help you deal with the situation and probably get you a better deal from the trustee and creditors than if you were doing this on your own.

The second point is that you should ask yourself: Whether I go bankrupt or not, can I afford to keep the house? If I try to hang on to it will it just drag me back into debt trouble down the line?

This is a tough one. We tend to be emotionally attached to our house in a way that we aren’t with most other things, even our cars. But, we have to ask ourselves this question if we’re going to regain control of our finances. The trustee can help you better understand your situation, but the answer to this question can only come from you. And you need to be brutally honest with yourself about it.

So, to get back to the original question: “If I go bankrupt will I lose my house?” For most people (the vast majority) the answer is “No!” So don’t be afraid to consult a trustee because you’re worried about losing the house. Contact us and get the facts. Remember our TV commercial: “It may be the most stress-relieving call you ever make.”

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The operators of Ontario’s Highway 407 Express Toll Route (ETR) can  no longer arrange for vehicle permits to be withheld from bankrupt drivers, according to a recent Ontario’s Court of Appeal ruling.

A January 2nd Toronto Star article states, “A recent series of court battles have attempted to resolve a key question that pits federal legislation against provincial: if a driver doesn’t pay the 407ETR toll, should the province take away their licence?”

The provincial Highway 407 Act dictated that the answer was yes. If the drivers didn’t take care of their tolls then the highway company could contact the province, which would refuse to issue vehicle permits to the drivers until everything was paid up.

This would include people who were undergoing bankruptcy and sometimes owed tens of thousands of dollars to the toll highway. Feeling that this violated the “fresh start” principle of the Bankruptcy Insolvency Act (BIA), lawyers launched a class action suit on behalf of  insolvent drivers  denied vehicle licences despite being declared bankrupt.

“As a trustee we had to tell people that though their future discharge would legally erase the debt, they would probably still have to pay the 407ETR debt or at least make a settlement with them if they wanted to license their car,” explains Richard Killen, president and trustee with Richard Killen & Associates. “There was nothing illegal about the 407ETR accepting a ‘voluntary’ payment from a discharged bankrupt. The Ministry of Transportation would then receive a notice from the 407ETR that the debt was paid and a licence would be issued. The circular argument made any effort to solve the problem an exercise in futility. The MOT simply shrugged and tossed the ball over to the 407ETR.”

He adds, “It took years for the Federal Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy to involve itself, and even that was only after a bankrupt pushed this challenge through the lower courts. This appellate decision pretty well puts to rest the whole question. Now we are in a position to tell people when they consult us that their debt to the 407ETR is as dischargeable as their debt to Visa. This is news.”

Posted On: June 15, 2014

During the holiday season, the joy many of us feel is tempered by our dread at opening credit card invoices in January. Apparently we pay for our pleasures.

We will make New Year’s resolutions and vow to shed weight at the gym and through dieting. Why not put your budget on a diet, embracing the discipline of Credit Free Friday?

This is a movement espoused by personal finance gurus David Ramsey and Canada’s own Gail Vaz-Oxlade. The belt-tightening up here gained steam last year when the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) and Vaz-Oxlade announced the launch of the Credit Free Friday campaign.

“Excessive use of credit cards, especially premium credit cards, contributes to escalating consumer debt and hurts small businesses,” explains its. “Credit Free Friday is a campaign that encourages Canadians to take a break from using their credit cards, one Friday at a time, by paying with cash or Interac Debit.”

The site also provides sobering credit card facts (the average Canadian now owes more than $27,000, and that doesn’t include mortgages), advice on how to get involved with Credit Free Fridays, a few debt stories and tools to help manage debt problems.

Posted On: June 14, 2014

While aging baby boomers aspire to a placid retirement, this dream is being threatened by a growing problem: senior debt. An August 2013 article in Financial Post says, for example, “A report provided [by] ratings agency Equifax Canada shows average debt for consumers aged 65 and over climbed 6.5 per cent over the past year, the biggest year-over-year increase in the period for any age group.”

Apparently Canadians 65 and older account for eight per cent of bankruptcies, up from six per cent five years ago. “There’s been an increase since 1987 in bankruptcy of people over 65 of 3,900 per cent, it’s just huge,” says Nadim Abdo, vice-president of consulting and analytical services at Equifax.

Some reasons for this alarming situation include:

•  People are living longer, so may not have saved enough money to cover their entire retirement.
• Parents are bailing out debt-ridden adult children.
• Seniors are sinking too much money into real estate, lured by low interest rates and the prospect of high returns.
• Widows or widowers don’t change their spending habits after a spouse dies and their pension disappears.

The results of this rising problem is not only the anxiety of dealing with creditors but the increased risk of health problems, such as rising blood pressure and heart attacks, and passing estates to heirs that have to be placed into bankruptcy because of crushing debt.

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Too often credit cards seem like easy money. Just hand it over to the clerk or type in the card number for your online purchase and, presto!, you have stuff. But you may pay to play. If you don’t take care of  your credit card balance on time, you can get penalized with late fees and bad credit scores.

While most of us know this on some level, it’s worth the reminder.  Canadians continue to fall further and further into debt, with their love of bank loans, car loans, lines of credit and credit cards leading the way. Last month the average Canadian consumer’s total debt rose $225 to $27,355 according to the latest analysis of credit trends by TransUnion.

So here’s five things you should know about the plastic plunderer in your pocket:

1. Don’t Live Without Grace: When buying with a credit card you are basically taking out a loan, which means paying interest. Usually the interest is waived if you pay within a “grace” period. Check to see whether your card’s grace period is 30 days, 20 days or one of the lovely “specialty” cards that has no grace period at all.
2. Minimum Payments Maximum Pain: What’s wrong with just paying the minimum balance cited on your credit card invoice? If you were to figure out how much time and money, in the form of interest payments, you would spend to pay off a balance with minimum payments, you would be staggered.
3. Never Be Late: Not only does missing the deadline for a credit card payment carry a financial penalty, it may bump up your interest rate and damage your credit rating. Ouch!
4. Dangers of Juggling: You might be tempted to transfer your balance to a credit card with a lower interest rate. This could be OK if  you pay off the balance during the period the low rate is offered. If not, check the fine print, because you may wind up paying  a higher rate than before.
5. Doesn’t Advance Your Cause: Doing cash advances with a credit card at an ATM is not a good idea. Not only are you charged a high interest rate there is no grace period. As soon as the money leaves machine, the credit clock is ticking.

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The fear is eating away your stomach lining. You can’t sleep. You can’t concentrate. You feel like a failure in the eyes of the world.

The envelopes of the unopened bills have changed to new ominous colours. The days you could juggle minimum payments between credit cards is coming to an end as you reach your limits. You stop answering the phone calls for fear of bill collectors . . . and then the phone stops working altogether.

Many people come to Toronto Licensed Insolvency Trustees gripped by the worst fear of their lives. They are looking at the end of their world, and who could be complacent in the face of that?

When people arrive at one of our offices for the first time, turning the handle of the front door feels as hard as moving a boulder. What our trustees try to convey at this meeting is that their visitors are not the first to have faced this situation. And while things might be dire, we are no longer a society that sends people to debtor prison. You can take concrete steps to deal with the crisis and begin the trip back to solvency and self-respect.

Of course, not all severe debt problems need to be dealt with by bankruptcy. But let’s assume you must face the worst. Does it mean that your world is over? No, absolutely not. While we cannot wave a magic wand and make everything go away, we can help you manage the process so that the road to recovery is seen clearly and followed sooner.

People ask if they will lose everything they have. No. Contrary to popular belief, you don’t lose all your assets when you go bankrupt. While there might be some things you have to give up, you will probably get to keep your furniture, personal effects, car and business tools.

What will stop the lawsuits and wage garnishees? some ask. A bankruptcy immediately stops anyone from suing or garnisheeing you, even the CRA. Only Family Responsibility Office Garnishees aren’t stopped.

Will my spouse and their property be affected by my bankruptcy? Probably not, except perhaps indirectly.

The above only touches on some of the issues a first free assessment covers. To get a full appraisal you need to come in and move the boulder on our front door. We guarantee that the knob will be a lot easier to turn on the way out.