Ask The Money Coach

Posts Tagged ‘government grants’

There are different kinds of government grants which you can apply for.  If you are looking for help to pay off your student loans, you can read this post, and this article too.  More information can also be found on this post. 

If you are a first-time homebuyer, you can find more information about grants which you can avail of in this article.

You can also read this article on the Best Place to Find Grants, Loans and Financing for Entrepreneurs if you are seeking information about grants for business owners.

A better strategy is to try to negotiate directly with your creditors.

A Facebook fan would like to know my opinion on debt settlement companies and government grants as a way out of debt.

To answer his question about getting out of debt, here are my thoughts.

First, I don’t recommend using debt settlement companies. They typically advise you to stop paying your bills for a few months. Then they go to your creditors and try to negotiate a settlement on your behalf. Their logic is that after a few months of not getting paid, creditors will be eager to take some money (instead of no money), so they will settle for pennies on the dollar, in terms of what you owed. The problem with this is that you do some serious damage to your credit rating. And there’s no guarantee that it will work. Creditors may just decide to sue you, get a judgment against you, or garnish your wages. I think a better strategy is to try to negotiate directly with your creditors. If that doesn’t work, then try credit counseling. A good non-profit credit counseling agency is the National Foundation for Debt Management. (www.NFDM.org). I’m a spokesperson for this organization, and I know that they do good work and are trustworthy.

Re: government grants, there are no programs that I know if specifically designed to give people money to get out of credit card debt. Some programs offer grants (i.e. free money) for other things … like financial assistance for starting a business, or monetary help to pay for childcare, that sort of thing. There are government programs to help people pay off student loans, but that’s another story.