ST. LOUIS (KMOX) - The current public health crisis is plunging some people into financial turmoil. Credit counselors say there are options to stay afloat.
Many creditors are showing flexibility, offering extensions or restructuring payment plans. Thomas Nitzsche, St. Louis based Financial Educator for the non-profit Money Management International attributes that to lessons learned during the last recession.
He tells KMOX, consumers have to be proactive in contacting creditors and should follow up if economic hardship continues.
"The concessions that they are offering today might be different two months from now, so there may be an additional extension or something you need to know about," Nitzsche says. "So make sure that you're setting those reminders to yourself to follow up on those things, because the last thing you want to do is damage your credit report in the process of all this."
Nitzsche says if you have suffered a dramatic loss of income, you may now qualify for other assistance programs, "ranging from things from food stamps, to financial aid on hospital bills, to creditor hardship programs, there's a lot of things that are available if your income changes drastically."
He says if you're still staying afloat but fear your income may be impacted in coming months, start planning now, "even if you've not been impacted yet, this is a really good wakeup call to all of us to have better financial health on a monthly basis and create a contingency plan of what would I do if this happens to me."
He says you need to decide what things are a priority, what things can be reduced or eliminated, what assets you can pull from, and make a list of which creditors you would need to contact in a worst-case scenario.
Credit assistance agencies say calls to hotlines have exploded.
Nitzsche says as one example, calls to the disaster response network for Fannie Mae mortgages is up from 100 calls in February to 2,700 calls in March.
@ 2020 KMOX (Entercom). All rights reserved.
