Rebranding Bankruptcy & Financial Rehabilitation

Katherine: Hello everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today on This Needs To Be Said. We’re here with Attorney Ron Drescher and he’s going to talk with us about, basically bankruptcy is not a bad thing. Helping you to learn that good people find themselves in crisis situations and how he can help you. And not just people that are filing bankruptcy but also people who just may find themselves, I want to call it a broken plan situation. You intended to pay back a debt and you just weren’t able to stick to the plan. He’s here to help you with that. He wants to be on the frontline of your financial rehabilitation.

Welcome back to This Needs To Be Said. Ron, how are you?

Ron Drescher: Thanks Katherine, I’m doing great. How are you doing? Happy New Year.
Katherine: Happy New Year to you as well. I’m doing wonderful and looking for great things to come out of 2018.

I am excited to get the information just at the consumers will be as they’re listening to us talk today. I got pen and paper out. I get excited every time I get the chance to talk with you, because you’re not just talking to someone who is at the end. You’re helping us along the way to look at our financial future.

You have published a book. I want you to mention that book before we get started today, because we’ve talked about it before and I want to ring the bell to the This Needs To Be Said audience, and remind them of that book. Then we’re going to go into what you’re wanting to help us with our financial rehabilitation on today.

Ron Drescher: Sure. The book you’re talking about is called File Bankruptcy and Get Rich, which is certainly an ear catching title. But it is expressed in a very sincere way. The feeling for the book is, all right you’ve got these debts and the debts are dragging you down. They’re stopping you from getting ahead financially.

So what would happen if we took away the debts and then you were able to save the money that you were paying towards creditors and invest it in fairly conservative investment vehicles like a Vanguard S&T fund or something like that.

What would it look like at the end of a certain period of time, like five years, 10 years, 20 years, where instead of paying minimum balances on a credit card, you are now paying yourself in an IRA or a 410K or just a straight investment fund? What would that look like? Where would you be in those five, 10, 15, 20 years if you were able to get out from under the debt?

That’s the premise of File Bankruptcy and Get Rich. We had over 1500 people read that book, and get a lot of benefit from it. At a certain point I thought, “You know, my readers, my clients, people out there, they need more help.” They need some specific strategies for saving money so that they can then invest the money, and then get ahead.

There’s a great book called “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” by a fellow named Robert Kiyosaki, who basically said that it’s not how much money you make, it’s how much money you keep that dictates how well you will do over the course of your life. With that truth in mind. I felt like it was important that I tell the world that as a bankruptcy lawyer who’s in the middle of the world of financial rehabilitation, that there are sound, innovative, and unexpected strategies for saving money so that you can fulfill the promise of File Bankruptcy and Get Rich.

That’s a project that I’m going to start for 2018 as hopefully well into the future.

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Katherine: The first one Ron is, isn’t it a bad idea for a bankruptcy lawyer to keep people out of debt? I’m saying that tongue and cheek. I do really want to know what brought you to the point … You do work with a lot of people, like you said that are in financial crises. That is what they come to you for. I need help.

What triggered it for you and said, “You know, this is something I need to add to my business. This is another way for me to serve people?” What brought that to your attention?

Ron Drescher: What a wonderful question, because there is a story behind it.
Katherine: I love stories.
Ron Drescher: Time after, time after time, I have clients that come in to me and they’ve got an expensive car loan. It’s not necessarily an expensive car, but it’s an expensive car loan. They’ve got bad credit, so they’re paying exorbitant interest, plus they’ve traded in a car that was already worth less than what they owed on the car.

So the new car company, the new car lender, rolls that old loan into the new car loan and they’re paying way more than the car that they just bought. That’s a trap that I see over and over again. Paying $500-$600-$800 a month for a car loan for people who really can’t afford that. What I advised them to do is a strategy of surrendering the car. Saving money, some cash. Then going to a car auction. There are car auctions in every city of every state around the country. And buying a car at auction.

As I give that advice, it dawned on me that I should really learn as much as I could about car auctions. I went out and I did a lot of research. There’s a lot of positives and a lot of negatives about buying cars at auction. I compiled all of the information of my research and I started writing articles and blogs about buying cars at auction.

I’ve been working on that and I said, “You know what? That’s really just the tip of the iceberg.” That’s just one strategy that my clients and other people in the situation like my clients, can use to save money so that they’re not behind the eight ball so much. And they’re not struggling so much from paycheck to paycheck, from month to month. They can actually get a little bit of relief in their lives.

I’ve taken on the mission to understand all of the different ways. There are all these websites out there that promise to save you money. Dealdash.com. Buying on eBay can really save money there. Is there a different in the retailers online? Do you really save money at Walmart? Is it worth it?

Is it worth going to Groupons? Is there a strategy to coupon clipping? That kind of thing. Then I decided, “You know what? I’m a bankruptcy lawyer. People know that I have experience consulting clients who are in financial distress and who have problems making their ends meet.”

Who’s better positioned than a bankruptcy lawyer to advise someone how to try to get ahead in their lives?” So I said, “You know what? Let’s have this series be the bankruptcy lawyer’s guide to saving money.” People who are searching for this information can know that I’m a trusted source, because I’ve been there, done that, seen all the horror stories, seen the success stories, and I have access to the information that they can really use.

Katherine: I’m smiling and nodding my head. While this is a radio interview, you can’t see all of that. Of course, it’s hindsight for the person who’s filing bankruptcy. We could’ve done these things or I wouldn’t have known to do these things until I met with you.

My second question for you, because I told you I had two in the beginning. Good, honest people. Is this something that good, honest people will find themselves needing to use, or is this for people who are always looking to get away with something?

Ron Drescher: One out of every 50 people that meet with, are people who I call angles-guy. He’s an angles-guy. He’s always looking at the angles to try to get ahead. That’s one out of 50. That means that the other 49 people are good, honest, hardworking, well intentioned people, who like you said at the beginning of the show. People when they take on debt, they have a plan.

They’re working. They have started up a business. They are married and they’re a two income family. They’re healthy and the plan is to pay down this debt. But then something goes wrong. They get sick. Their business doesn’t perform as well. They get laid off. They get divorced.

Then the plan collapses and where are they? They are in crisis. They’re in crisis because their plan didn’t work out for reasons, pretty often outside of their control. That’s what I see

So yeah. I think that the strategies that I’m going to be exploring and the techniques that I already discussed with my clients for managing their crisis and getting out of debt, will work for good and honest people, and is really perfectly applicable for them.

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Katherine: Awesome. I wanted to definitely let our This Needs To Be Said audience know, when I asked that question of Attorney Drescher, we were in preparation for the show. In reading over some of a blog that he’s preparing, that’s what came up. Good, honest people, they just want to do the right thing. You made an agreement with someone and you want to pay them back, and it doesn’t happen. There’s shame and embarrassment. You feel bad that you can’t pay people back and it seems like you just don’t have a good enough story or reason to tell a person why I don’t have this money for you. Why I can’t give you back what I promised you.

He named a lot of the reasons, the big reasons why people aren’t able to keep that promise. Not because they don’t like you or they’re being malicious. Things changed in their lives since the beginning of their plan, which could happen. By following his advice, by working with him, you can now put yourself in a better position.

I would say, Ron, I would dare say, you’re putting people in a better position of keeping their promises, because they’re going to places like the car auction and they know how to do that and to get transportation., because that’s what we want. We want nice cars. We want transportation that is going to get us everywhere we want to go, not just point A to point B.

You teach us things like that, then it’s easier for me to keep a short term agreement than a long term one because life happens and sometimes we don’t have enough saved up to catch all of the storms that may come. That’s what I believe I’m hearing from you on today.

Am I following along correctly?

Ron Drescher: I think that’s exactly right.
Katherine: All right. I’m looking forward to the series and what all you’re going to bring to me, my This Needs To Be Said audience, and all of your potential customers.

I do have another question for you, because I’ve read many articles. Step 1-2-3. How to do this. You can do it this way. It’s easy as, but the thing that I found that I have to have my mindset right in order to be able to receive and follow any step plan that someone puts out for me.

Talk to me about the mindset of the people that are going to receive the information that we share during the interview. How is it going to help them to really stick to the plan, because part of our problem, as consumers, is not sticking to the plan for whatever reason?

Ron Drescher: First of all, there are a few things.

One of the things that’s really important is to reduce your tasks to very, very small bites. Something that you can manage on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, so that you’re not overwhelmed by it.

I don’t like New Year’s resolutions. I’m always against them, because you get into February and you’ve abandoned the New Year’s resolution and end up feeling worse about yourself, which has defeated the whole point of the resolution. What I believe in is learning through very manageable habits, how to accomplish something.

Let’s say you want to go coupon hunting. You’ve got a big stack of coupons that arrive in your mail or that you pick up at the grocery store. You’re putting it aside and you say, “I’m going to spend two hours every week going through these coupons.”

I would say, “Don’t do that.” Don’t do that. Do five minutes every three days. That way you know … I mean five minutes. You can do five minutes. You can do five minutes while you’re sitting waiting for your hard boiled eggs to boil. Take five minute increments every three days and look through the stack.

Then when you go shopping you know you’re going to have 10 coupons, instead of putting everything aside for a week and then something’s going to come up and you’re not going to have those two hours. Then you’ve lost the week.

I think that’s the most important thing in the mindset of achievement, is to break your goal tasks down to very small, manageable bites. That’s a way to stay on plan, to stay on task.

Katherine: Now, I know our time is running out, and we’ve been talking this entire time, but my last question for you is why should we listen to you, an attorney, who practices bankruptcy law?
Ron Drescher: Bankruptcy lawyers are on the frontline of financial rehabilitation. We help people who come to us in crisis, whose finances have collapsed or are in the process of collapsing. We help them through the difficult bankruptcy process, so that they emerge in a much better place.

We see people who are in crisis. We see and deal with people all the time, who need financial rehabilitation. So why wouldn’t you want to listen in to a person who is in that world, who is on the frontlines of that world, giving their best possible advice on how to succeed once they’ve emerged.

Katherine: Absolutely. I think that you would be the perfect resource for someone. If the people in the This Needs To Be Said audience have not experienced anything, then we’re not talking to you, but for those who have, and I know that there’s somebody out there who has experienced some form of crisis, felt like you were alone, did not have anybody to turn to other than our friends who may have not had our similar situation, that were giving us well meaning, bad advice. This is the person that you want to have as a resource. And It’s not bad. Bankruptcy is not a bad word. We want you to be comfortable with looking at anything in your financial life that will lead you towards the road of bankruptcy, you want to listen to this guy, because he’s not only talking to those who need to pick up the phone right now, or shoot him an email and say, “Help me.” He’s talking to the people who are seeing things unravel. You’re seeing your situation get tricky.

We’re going to talk more in future conversations about the car buying at auctions, so if you are tied up in a bank loan or car loan right now, he may be sharing with you some tips on what to do to put yourself in a better position. As well as other things.

Yes, we touched on coupon shopping. For those who coupon shop, I know you gasped, “No. What do you mean? Don’t commit so much time?” We’re going to talk more about all of those things, because he wants to help you have a better financial future, believe it or not, coming from a bankruptcy attorney. And because he’s seen so many horror stories, he’s the best person to tell you what financial decisions to make that will keep you out of those horror stories for yourself.

Attorney Drescher, tell everyone how to get in touch with you, and also how to get a copy of your book.

Ron Drescher: The easiest way to get a copy of our book is to go on Drescherlaw.com. That’s www. D-R-E-S-C-H-E-R-L-A-W .com, or you can always call my office at 443-438-1966. You’ll speak to our office and we’ll be happy to send out a copy of the book.
Katherine: Awesome. Until next time. Thank you so much for stopping by This Needs To Be Said.
Ron Drescher: Well, thank you Katherine. I always enjoy it.
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