DEL.ICIO.USMan’s credit lessons come from bitter experience
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Friday, December 26, 2008
Duane White started his presentation at DeKalb County’s Wesley Chapel Library with a confession: “I’ve filed for bankruptcy — twice.”
After his second trip to what he calls “credit jail,” White focused on never going back behind financial bars.
LOUIE FAVORITE / lfavorite@ajc.com
After filing for bankruptcy twice, Duane White has learned his lesson and is passing along his knowledge in free classes.
He developed a spartan lifestyle and pored through laws and educational guides to learn all he could about credit. Before long, the subject became his passion. For about 10 years, teaching others about credit has been his mission — at absolutely no charge.
“You have to protect your credit like you protect your child,” White tells his students. “You have to be fierce.”
An insurance adjuster by day, White, 47, spends about 10 hours a month on nights and weekends teaching classes and holding individual sessions on credit with interested graduates.
He works through his own nonprofit, Need to Know Information Inc., formed not to solicit money, he says, but for legitimacy.
“You can’t pay me in cash,” White said. “You can pay me in effort.”
Most of his classes are hosted by the Small Business Administration and held in DeKalb County libraries. He’s also hoping to publish a book he’s written, “What’s My Credit Got To Do With It? … Everything!”
Carol Ford, 50, of Conyers, was a single mother struggling with all the debt that came out of her divorce when she attended White’s four-part series of classes.
“When I met Duane, I wasn’t just in credit jail, I was in maximum security. I couldn’t even buy a loaf of bread on credit,” Ford said.
After learning how to read a credit report and how to negotiate with credit bureaus and debt collectors, Ford paid off her debt. She now owns a personal care home in Conyers and plans to open another near the airport early in the new year.
“The principles that Duane taught me saved my life,” Ford said. “As a single woman, when you have good credit it’s like having a good husband. I take myself out, I travel, I can purchase and own assets. I do a lot of things that a good husband would do for his wife.”
That may be why her teacher isn’t married.
Though he earns a salary, the credit man takes no vacations. He has no cellphone and no cable. All his furniture, his TV and stereo equipment were given to him used, and he drives a 1998 Chevy Camaro that he bought second-hand.
He doesn’t use an ATM card and limits his “fun money” to the weekly cash allowance he gives himself. That ranges from zero to no more than $100. He uses only the secured credit card he got to re-establish credit after his second bankruptcy in 1992. He keeps a nonsecured card just for emergencies.
He shares these aspects of his life in classes he keeps light and interactive. In one of them, some years ago, his students put on a videotaped play: “Credit Jail — Guilty or Innocent — The Trial of Freddie Mac Daddy.”
Despite his approach, White is dead serious about his topic — and so are his students.
David Potter, 54, now of Memphis, was engaged to his wife, Shirley, when she suggested they support her co-worker by attending one of his early credit classes.
Both of them had been married before, so they’d made sure to ask each other about lots of things, save for a big thing — their financial histories.
Sitting through White’s classes and doing his homework together solved that problem.
“I was trying to figure out a way of broaching this subject without sounding so intrusive, and vice versa,” David Potter said. “He just took a load off of our minds in that respect, and for that, I love him.”
DUANE WHITE’S TIPS ON HANDLING CREDIT
Check your credit report every three to four months for continued accuracy and to make sure that old claims beyond the statute of limitations have not been placed there.
As soon as possible, get a secured credit card — whose limit is based on the amount you deposit into an account — and stop using all nonsecured credit cards. “That turns the non-secured debt into installment loans that you can pay off monthly to get control of that debt,” White said.
There is no such thing as “credit repair,” White said. Credit repair was a term coined to make people think someone could make their credit problems disappear, he said. “Your credit is not something you can repair,” he said. “It’s a financial contractual agreement. You have to settle that agreement.”
“When you’re in trouble, you must continue to try to pay your bill. Send them something, and send a check,” White said. “Even if they don’t cash it, it shows good faith. If they send it back, keep everything, even the envelope.”
Some resources: The Fair Credit Reporting Act and the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. To find out more about White’s classes, send an e-mail to credited@juno.com.
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