Getting Your Financial House in Order with Paul Schumann

Paul Schumann is with us in this week’s episode. He is here to talk with us about all things finance related, as he is the founder of Wise Wealth Choices Inc. He has 46 years of experience in real estate, working with builders and developers, and is also a skilled negotiator in helping companies settle creditor accounts. With his experience as a business money lender, he finds solutions to the most difficult financial situations.

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On this episode of the Live. Love. Engage. podcast:

• A little about Paul’s holistic health background and how it supports his business.
• Paul’s experience with a Chiropractor and how it changed his life.
• How learning to understand emotions has helped Paul with negotiations.
• Why business owners need to have a business plan.
• The most important aspects of a credit report and what to pay attention to.
• Why credit disputes should always be in writing.
• How personal credit reports differ from business credit reports.
• How an inquiry on your credit influences your credit score.
• What kind of legal issues a CPA can advise you on.
• What will help you get the highest credit score possible.
• Why the credit game is like a game of Monopoly.
• How to get a lower interest rate on your credit card.
• Why business owners panic and lie, and how this hurts them.
• How to build a better rapport with creditors over time.
• How Paul saved one client $100,000.
• The book Paul recommends to learn more about negotiating.

Connect with Paul:

Email: paul@wisewealthchoices.com

TRANSCRIPT

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TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:02] I am Gloria Grace Rand, founder of the Love Method and author of the number one Amazon best seller, Live Love Engage How to Stop Doubting Yourself and start being yourself.

[00:00:15] In this podcast, we share practical advice from a spiritual perspective on how to live fully, love deeply and engage authentically so you can create a life and business with more impact, influence and income.

[00:00:33] Welcome to Live, Love, Engage.

[00:00:37] Namaste and welcome to Live Love Engage. I am Gloria Grace Rand.

[00:00:43] And today we’re going to be talking about all things financial things like how to get better interest rates or credit scores and all sorts of things anyway, anything related to finances and your business and even your personal life, because in order to live fully, you really do it helps to have your financial house in order. And so joining me today on the program is Paul Shulman, and he is an expert. And all this stuff is I’ll get to in a moment. First off, welcome to Live Love Engage.

[00:01:20] Paul, thank you. Thank you for having me here, Gloria. I really appreciate helping people and giving lots of good information, something that they can use right away and things that they may need to take some time to work.

[00:01:33] Well, I am excited to have you on the show because, as I said, it’s been well in this year in particular. I think it’s been challenging for a lot of people when it comes to finances. And as we’re recording this, it’s the middle of November already. And we’ve been dealing with this the year of the pandemic. But before I get to that, let me just tell you, all of you who are listening and watching out there a little bit more about this gentleman, he is the founder of Wise Wealth Choices Inc, and his background actually covers a multitude of disciplines, including forty six years of experience in real estate. And he has worked with individuals as well as builders and developers. He’s also a skilled negotiator. So he has helped companies and destress settle creditor accounts in a way that provides a win for both parties, which is good. And with his experience as a business money lender, he finds solutions for the most difficult situations, whether in real estate or business.

[00:02:36] And that’s not all, because he’s also has been previously licensed it in life insurance and securities and is also a holistic health practitioner if that’s not enough for you. So he’s got the practical plan and a little bit more of the spiritual side to him, which is something that really intrigued me about him when I when I met this gentleman. And his core value is integrity. Integrity, if I can’t speak today, I’m sorry, is known for his honest and forthright approach. So let’s see. I’m trying to think where you know, let’s let’s start first. I want to ask you a little bit, because one of the things that did intrigued me a bit, and we’ll get to some of the more nuts and bolts stuff later. But tell me a little bit about what what kind of holistic health background you have and and how does that actually help you in your current business?

[00:03:30] That’s a very interesting thing, and it’s interesting how I transitioned into it by accident. I was about nineteen eighty nine and I was working in a real estate office in Carlsbad and the market had already started to take a down slide. Things were happening and my manager walked over to me and noticed that I’d be walking around the guy’s shoulders talking to him and I’d be rubbing their shoulders and he came back to me, says Paulistas.

[00:03:58] Listen.

[00:04:00] It seems like this market is really down and you’re going through a transition right now, and I think you need a little break. Have you ever thought about doing something on the holistic area? And what’s interesting is John, who is our manager, was also a busy international speaker and trainer, and he actually put our entire real estate company through a dicey program. When you saw my profile and stuff and saw me, what was doing? He says it’s time for a change. You need something more kinesthetic or actual. So what he did was in that suggestion, he came back and said, all right, you need to switch to something else that was interesting is at the time, I was a commercial leasing agent for a building and and so on a beach on Seijas called the Center for Total Health. Now, the building was mostly empty and the owner was not doing a very good job, left in disrepair. But I took over as a leasing agent and a massage company came up to me. And said, oh, we would like to lease this big, gigantic space here, five thousand square feet so we can have a teaching class, teach massage and stuff, I said, you know, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll work a deal with you out on the rent if you put me in the class. And that was my I would say and transition into the massage area, nutritional area. But let me back up a few years. Nineteen eighty three. I ended up I was running an owner of a tire shop in Santa Fe Springs, California, and I was pulling a truck tire off of a car when a truck one day and it dropped really hard and it ripped my insides out and that ended up creating a four inch blood clot in my jugular vein. Oh, my gosh. Frenches and I ended up in a hospital. They check me out, said you have a very serious problem. Yeah. All sorts of X-rays and said.

[00:06:13] And I had some of the top specialists in the United States working on me, guys who did dissertations, and he said there is nothing that we can do because the jugular vein is the largest vein in the human body.

[00:06:23] So we can’t take a vein from another part, splice it in or do anything. And he said, you’re going to have to live with this for the rest of your life. But if it ever moves, you’ve got three hours to be in surgery or you’ll die during that, right after that I had gone back to a chiropractor and that had worked on my back getting me out of a wheelchair because of muscle strength. And the doctors didn’t understand. But literally, I went in in a wheelchair. Two hours later, I walked out. And from that point on, this is chiropractor literally rebuilt my body. And within weeks I was so strong I was lifting railroad ties over my head, building a wall in my backyard. Wow. I mean, it was amazing, the transition from what a chiropractor did from literally facing surgery to being incredibly powerful and strong again. So when this blood clot thing came back, I went back to him just for a regular checkup and he said, hey, I’ve got this unusual treatment thing anyway. Long story into a short one. Pile crystals all over me for 12 weeks and it all sorts of these weird little incantations. And he said what he’s doing is he’s balancing my my energetic body, take care of whatever might happen and using kinesiology to test me every day to one day I woke up and I came into his office and said, OK, doc, does this thing ever going to go away?

[00:07:50] Yes, it’s going away today. Oh, I said, OK, then what time do you go? Nine o’clock tonight. Well, nine o’clock that night, I went to a birthday party at a place called Crackers and Orange and Orange County and.

[00:08:05] About five minutes before 9:00, the ban came in and start testing all their instruments and hitting me with sound waves and all that sort of stuff, and my wife at that time looked at me. She said, Are you OK? I said, yeah, I sort of feel OK. And about two or three minutes later, she looked at me again and said, Are you really OK? I said, Why are you asking? He says, You have no more color left in your eyes. I was as white as my beard, my entire body. Everything is drained out of me. What was happening inside me was going to be monumental in about 60 seconds. I walked out towards the front door and that’s as far as I made it. I sat down on a chair. I said, whatever you do, don’t touch me. And a blood clot exploded in my chest and literally exploded. And I went into a whirlwind of black things. And it. Hit my head and just spun it in circles, dripping wet from head to toe in a matter of seconds, but when I came out of it. I was OK, I went home, went to sleep, called my doctor, said, Doc, something amazing happened.

[00:09:12] And he goes, no, it didn’t, or you would be dead right now. So you’re not talking to me. Nothing happened. And see me in two days. And I was dumbfounded.

[00:09:21] He wouldn’t even look at me, went back to my car, piled up in Krystal’s again with this magic wand and my lymphatic gland, which was larger than the size of a golf ball, started to shrink back almost to normal. By the time I’m in the doctor’s office would also do surgery on my right knee.

[00:09:40] And he said he looked now what happens is when your brain gets blocked off. All the veins in your arm stopped working and literally my arms swelled up. So I had to have an elastic bandage on my arm for a year, but when I walked in, I didn’t have the bandage on, so it takes my arm up and all the blood drains out. You ever heard the word a Kodak moment? Yeah. If I had had a camera and taken a picture of his face when he saw my arm, it was. Like, stymied. All I can see him is reach over to the wall, grab the phone, says Nurse Vinograd STATT now click Razmi down X-rays dies in my body, checked it, pulled up.

[00:10:26] The X-rays is gone. I said, what happened?

[00:10:33] I don’t know. What did you do? And I explained to the car is now that that’s all I get that I said, you tell me what happened.

[00:10:41] He says it’s not your time.

[00:10:44] You have more things to do in this world to help people. And what was interesting is shortly thereafter I started working with a psychic transmitting again, which was an unusual thing because the he had in the paper had the wrong phone number. I had to call the PennySaver to get the right phone number. And he turned me down three times. He said, I don’t work with men. I work with women because men are too stubborn. But after he heard my story, he took me on and he taught me deep, deep psychic work inside me, internal work where I could really go inside my body, inside my brain, inside cage fight fears do things. And then one day I ended up being paralyzed. It took me to fire through a fear. And when I came out of it through a series of processes, I absolutely, for the first time in my life, learned what? A, when somebody is paralyzed due to fear, yeah, but there’s really nothing wrong with them. I absolutely now know how to get them out of that paralysis. I haven’t had a chance to do that. I’ve checked around. Doctors won’t let you really mess with your patients. But literally, I absolutely know now how to get inside the brain with the fear around and bring them out to be normal, probably within two hours back to normal. And I saw this happen to me twice, once when he put me in a deep trance and once when I had somebody else in the room where I actually read their minds, I was had the ability to actually go into another person’s brain and read what they were saying and tell them if they’re lying or telling the truth, that caused some issues. But anyway, so then over the years I was helping people doing things I need them to understand.

[00:12:35] I could walk up and see somebody and know what was wrong with them. Mm hmm. That’s again, it took four months for me to transition from part to part B, but I was also literally I could walk into a room. I want to go, hey, your head’s really hurting. I did. You know that your head’s twisted. He says, the doctors worked on me for a year. I got hit in the head with a steel beams. Yeah. And it was twisted. So he sat down in front of me. Within seconds, I put my hands on his head, held it really hard, and I let go. And he said, how did you know? I know what he says. You took your hands off two seconds after the pain stopped.

[00:13:13] And he stood up and he says, oh, my God, what happened?

[00:13:18] He says, For a year I’ve been in pain. In 30 seconds, I no longer have any pain. It’s gone. And I’ve been able to do this for dozens of people, right, but then I integrated and I realized that there’s something more I have to get back into the world.

[00:13:35] Yeah. And I transition back into real estate. I started helping people on other levels and I got in nineteen ninety three I got into with a debt settlement company who literally had lost all their all their negotiators. And I had never done any.

[00:13:51] I sat down with the president and the vice president, I said, I’ll give it on.

[00:13:56] Put him in front of me, so he started handing me a file cabinet over files of people that owed money that they had taken in his clients. And I start pulling about one at a time, all the dead are up, asking a few questions, calling credit are up and within 30 days I emptied the filing cabinet. I settled every last one of them and saved. I know at that time, I probably saved about 50 different companies from going bankrupt and being sued. Whatever happened inside me gave me the ability to literally understand the emotions and characteristics of both the debtor. And when I talk to the creditor, what I needed to say to them so they would be on my side. Right. And I’ll tell you, some of the best settlements I got were with credit attorneys. And I’ll explain my last client that I had. You had one hundred and seventy eight thousand dollars in credit card debt. I didn’t know what to do. His wife had been making a million dollars a year and the company got into a big lawsuit with them and they lost everything on their income for a long time. When I negotiated, I found out that all these credit cards were already in the hands of attorneys for lawsuits.

[00:15:14] And I started working with the attorneys explaining of the hardship that had gone through because there are also other issues in the background medical issues that nobody was aware of. And by the time I got through talking to him on his level and brought an understanding to it, I settled every one of the credit card debts, wiped out all the losses and settle them for 30 cents on the dollar. By the time they pay me my fees and everything, settle the debts, they saved a hundred thousand dollars that they no longer had to pay. All their debts were completely cleaned and wiped off. They were back to normal. And I’ve done this more times than I can count, literally over and over, sometimes it only so 30 percent sometimes. Forty forty five percent depending upon. How complex the problem was, the type of debt it was, even though my biggest debt with an aerospace company and Comerica Bank, it took me a year and a half, but I took Comerica Bank, who held the UCC one, filing on their assets, their income receivables, everything at one point six billion dollars to four hundred thousand over 10 years with no interest.

[00:16:30] I saved the aerospace company one point two million dollars and battled the roughest attorney firms. But I did it from a holistic standpoint by reading energy. Right, and understanding who they were.

[00:16:45] So that whole episode I had in my life gave me an amazing ability to work with these things and help people. Yeah, that’s how it sort of all transitioned.

[00:16:56] Well, I appreciate that. So how can how could most of the people who watch, who watch, they watch it, watch the show on YouTube or if they’re listening to our entrepreneurs.

[00:17:08] And I know that it’s important for entrepreneurs to be able to manage their debt if especially if they’ve maybe had to borrow money going into starting a business.

[00:17:20] So how do how can the best way I want to ask this, what is actually I ask that what is what should a business person know and entrepreneur know about what’s important for them to know about their credit report and and how to be able to use it effectively to be able to know what what should they be looking for? Let’s put it that way.

[00:17:47] All right. So first of all, before I transitioned into the credit area, you asked me the number one most important thing a business needs to understand.

[00:17:58] They need to have a business plan.

[00:18:02] Believe it or not, 60 percent of the businesses that have all failed never had a plan. So all the entrepreneurs, all the big gurus out there said if you don’t have a business plan, then you’ve plan to fail. And that’s how it really works. And it’s same way when you’re looking at your credit reports, when you understand what the credit report means and how to read it and where you’re going with it, there’s a plan. And how you plan your credit is incredibly important, reading and understanding a credit report isn’t that complicated, but you need to do it on a regular basis. And I tell people for a personal side of it, you need to go to annual credit report, dot com and your credit report. It is a federal government site. It allows you to pull all three of your credit reports every week for free because of the pandemic. And there’s no issues with it. You just you just go online, type in your information. You can choose from Experian, TransUnion, Equifax. You can pull all three of them downloaded to a PDF and you can read it. You can then find the errors in it. OK, explain something in your personal report. If you have erroneous addresses, if your name is spelled wrong. If the second messed up on your Social Security number, believe it or not, that’s actually harming you. That’s when the credit bureaus do a research on who you are and interrogatories.

[00:19:33] They’re going to look up your name, your Social Security numbers, your address, where you live. And if there’s wrong information in there, they have actually put wrong information on my credit report, my check, my credit report. Typically about once every two months, I’ll go online, pull it, look at it, make sure and then I’ll send in a series of challenges because typically they’ll mess up phone numbers, addresses, something going on or something. In my credit file, a credit card company put the wrong information in. Somebody erroneously put an in and I’ll send it a dispute on it. Disputes the credit card companies are made to credit card or agencies like Experian, TransUnion, Equifax must be in writing never, ever, ever use their online dispute system. This is handled by a computer called E Oscar. The Oscar doesn’t understand human beings. It looks at mechanical stuff on your report and determines whether or not it appears to be right, wrong or indifferent. And unfortunately, computers make mistakes. Why? Because their program by humans, they do not think things out completely. That’s true. Yet they get 80 to 90 percent correct. Then there’s 10 to 20 percent of us out there that end up suffering. And that’s why you’ve got to put it in writing. And and what I suggest when you put it in writing.

[00:21:02] Is make it sound as if you can handwrite it. That’s even the best thing.

[00:21:08] That’s what happens is if they’re typewritten and they scan it through computer systems, the computers read them. But if it’s handwritten and a little floppy, maybe even a couple of colors in there to make it make it unique, a human being has got to have to read it because it can’t be you can’t be automated. So now a human being is reading it.

[00:21:31] And if you really tell your story correctly about what you believe is wrong on your credit reports in front of you, you’ve got a better than even chance of getting it removed. It doesn’t cost you anything. You do not have to hire credit repair companies.

[00:21:47] I know I’ve worked with quite a few of them and even their automated system. I was actually going to open up a credit repair company when I started to realize that people really don’t need that.

[00:21:58] The only thing that people get stumbled on is writing the letters. And if they had a copy of a letter or something similar to it, they could do it.

[00:22:07] But people are lazy and they credit repair companies literally will charge you six hundred a thousand dollars to do what you can do for free if you want to take 20 to 30 minutes, about every 30 to forty five days, because it takes that long for the different agencies to review a report.

[00:22:29] Looking at your report is important, making sure anything on there that’s incorrect is challenged and it can be as simple as this is not mine. I don’t know how you got on here, but this doesn’t belong to me. Remove it or I don’t understand. This is the payment numbers are wrong. The dates are everything is messed up and you need to investigate it. Credit reporting agency has to take 30 days, contact the original creditor, go through records. If they don’t get a response back, then remove it off your report. And that’s the only way credit repair agencies remove stuff from the report and challenge them. Right. If it doesn’t work the first time, they’ll do it again and again and again. And it’s repetition because eventually, after a while, sometimes I get tired of this, you had to leave. It’s no big deal. And to get rid of it, yeah. Now transitioning into business credit reports, that is a horse of a different color. And when I explain this, there are no laws or regulations regarding business credit reports. There are no overseers of the government and they can put out whatever they want. And if you prove them to be wrong, they won’t care. They won’t even change it. They won’t even listen to you. Now, I know because one of my credit reports came back from one of my companies and I’ve had a corporation for five years.

[00:23:50] I had a lot of business credit. Yes. I specify when I open up credit cards that it’s a business account. When I go to Staples or something, I open up a business account. So they report and the report that Dun and Bradstreet, Experian Business and Equifax business and Equifax business is actually pretty big on their on their consumer side. They’re not as big a commercial side. They are Dun and Bradstreet. Everybody knows the name, but they’re actually the smallest amount of viable information in the industry. Typically, if you want to open up a commercial account at Sears or Staples or Office Depot or Best Buy. Right. They will look at Dun and Bradstreet. They will look to see how many other creditor accounts. And if you’ve been paying on time, if that’s their only source. Right. If you go to a bank, they’ll kind of cursory glance at Dun and Bradstreet and then they’ll go to a novice or they’ll go to one of the other big companies that look at your business and your personal, and they will pick that information out to make a decision. Now, if you’ve never heard of this and know this, I and Ovid’s and Novas dot com.

[00:25:10] Their credit reports on you personally are astounding when I pull a credit report off of Experian or Equifax and I get all the pages, it might be 20, 30 pages of detailed information. Right. I pulled my enough credit report.

[00:25:26] It was one hundred and ten pages long. Holy Smoke went back more than 40 years in my history to address when I was in my in my 30s and 20s and 30s, it had information on companies that I totally forgot that I even had. Oh, had information on me. That was mind boggling. And it was the most complete report I have ever seen and I started to use that, and the information on them is actually more correct. Most of the other ones, I started to understand a little bit more about how these agencies work. Now also going back into the the business and again, Dun and Bradstreet, if you don’t have a DeAnda file, it costs nothing to create one. Just call up Dansby and say, I want a business file. They’re going to ask you your name, who the officers are, a few bits of information, address phone numbers. They’ll create you and say here’s your Dun and Bradstreet number.

[00:26:27] So why is that important to have that?

[00:26:30] Ok, again, if you’re a business and you want credit lines at Staples. That’s right. You’re going to be looking at us. We’re asking you to see if you’ve ever done business before.

[00:26:40] Ok, so when you go to Staples and when you go to Dun Bradstreet, when you go to other stores, you’re Dun and Bradstreet. No saying please make sure that my account is reported to Dun and Bradstreet. Anyone with credit cards, Capital One, US Bank, they all report to Dun and Bradstreet and they report to some of the other ones.

[00:27:01] Why is that important? Because it builds your paid XCOR. I typically Hadash score is not a real big deal because you can have one one creditor.

[00:27:12] And for four months in a row, and you’ll get an 80 paid score, which doesn’t mean much, but if you have less than that, you have a problem.

[00:27:21] So the store companies that you want credit with are going to look at that. See you pay to 80 paid, but they’re all going to see how many creditors that actually was. If it’s one, it won’t hold a lot of force. But if you have 15, 20 creditors on there that you do normally do business and you have an 80 or higher pay tax, that will mean a lot to them as far as opening your report.

[00:27:44] Some of them will also poire your personal credit report. Some will do a soft inquiry.

[00:27:50] Some will do a hard inquiry. Sourced inquiry does not hurt your credit report or your scores or anything. Right. But a hard inquiry will actually take your credit score down anywhere from three to 15 points, depending upon how many you do over what period of time. Right. So it’s an important issue and it’s involved and inquiries your 10 percent of your credit report. So if you’ve got an 850 credit report. Eighty five points of that is an inquiry area. And if that moves a little bit, your score can go down.

[00:28:21] And that’s pretty much how the business end of it is. And again, and setting up business lines of credit.

[00:28:30] You you’ve got to make sure you’ve got the right entity, is it an LLC, is it a C Corp? Is it an escort? What is it doing? If you’re a small business, you probably want an escort. And I see why an escort as opposed to an LLC personal choice, an escort protects you under liability issues. But when it comes to federal taxes. All your profits and losses roll through to you on your personal schedule, meeting your personal income tax so you’re not paying corporate tax, and if you didn’t make a lot of money personally, the money rolling through could keep you in lower income tax bracket. Also, if you lost money in the corporation, say you’ve had some investments over here making money, it would offset them. Now, there’s a balance between that and you can take salaries out of it or not choose to roll through on a personal or you can pay self employment tax and other things. And again, it’s just a personal choice for small businesses. Right? Real estate. You want an LLC? Yeah, it’s typically real estate. You’ve got investors. You wanted limited partners. You don’t want them involved. If there’s a lawsuit for them to be involved in the lawsuit generally, particularly it’s the general manager that gets hit and LLC assets they get, not you. Yeah. So there’s different things. And again, depending upon what kind of business you have, how many employees you have and what you’re doing out there, I would contact an attorney.

[00:29:56] Ok, that’s what I was going to ask you. Who would you recommend Target? You like your accountant or an attorney?

[00:30:02] So, yes, both. And again, how you set your structure up depends upon your tax base that a CPA is going to advise you on that.

[00:30:13] Usually, CPAs are pretty good on legal issues, knowing if an LLC is will protect you better than a C Corp in your particular instance. Now, I have used Legal Shield for more than 10 years and I call them all the time. Every time there is a problem with a corporation, any time there’s a problem with an issue, somebody wants to create a lawsuit. I pick up the phone. It doesn’t cost anything to talk to. I’ve talked to them. I’ve sent them documents.

[00:30:42] When I get non-disclosure agreements from major companies that I work with or I have contracts to sue me for, for work. Everything is run by an attorney. And if I don’t like that attorney, I’ll send it back to him and say I have a different attorney. I want a second opinion because it’s just a monthly fee and it runs out. It could run the auction 20 to 50 dollars a month. And I want the full more business end or just personal. And again, if it’s a personal business, you don’t have any corporations. You just and I would say on a personal land and if necessary, I can send you a link to get you into.

[00:31:18] It’s a great thing.

[00:31:20] And again, that’s and that’s how you’re looking at your business credit. Everything has to do with when you go and buy in a store, go to the store and ask them. If they have a business credit line so he can set up a corporate account now they’re going to ask a lot of questions. They’ll go through little things. They may again hit your credit report. They may ask. They may look at Dun and Bradstreet. And again, when you’re doing that, the most important thing you need to ask you is where do you report to? Is it just that inventory? Is it Equifax? Is it Experian business? Where is it? Because you want to make sure that they’re reported to him. And if the company says we don’t report to anybody, you might choose a different supplier in the same industry then does report because you want that credit as long as you’re willing to pay your bills on time and do all those things. You want somebody that reports now, like I said in the beginning, an 80 paid X store, it’s just being make your payments on time if you want something higher than 80, which is very nice when creditors see that, yes, you have to pay your bills early. OK, and when I say early, if you have a net 30 percent in 10 days. No, wait, the 30 days, if a bill comes in and you pay it when it comes in as opposed to net 30, your score can actually come all the way up to one hundred. Oh, well, now if a supplier goes in there and lets you score AC one hundred and go, oh we’re going to get paid quick on this one. Yeah. We got to prove it. There’s no derogatory because you can’t get one hundred if you start making late payments.

[00:33:07] Yeah. That means you’ve been on time with everybody and you’ve been early on your payments. That means a lot to a supplier because he needs to use your money to go buy more supplies and resupplies stock. So how you pay is important to them. And that’s where the Dun and Bradstreet payday store comes in. OK, the other ones will look back to see whether or not you’ve had lawsuits, issues, derogatory. They’ll look at all that. And again, they’ll also look at your personal credit report. And that’s why keeping your personal credit report is so important, because they’re going to look at your business card. Yeah, your business is doing OK. They look at your personal go. Wait a minute. You know, you got lawsuits and other issues personally. Will that impact the business? Yeah, because if somebody gets a judgment against you and attacks your assets, which is your business, all of a sudden they could lose their their money that you owe them. Yeah, maintaining a very good personal report is incredibly important for your business as well as it is for you personally. And again, a difference between a 580 credit score and a 680 credit score could mean the difference between an interest rate being, you know, seven or eight percent and 14 or 15 percent. When you borrow a lot of money and the numbers get astronomical, yeah, and a friend of mine I’m working on help him fix his credit score because he didn’t know anything about his in his 80s, he said, I don’t know, I got these credit cards. I saw how much interest he paid in one year. And I think he owes a total of maybe seventeen thousand dollars.

[00:34:44] Not much money. Right. But he paid mega thousands in interest at as interest rates to near between 16 and 25 percent. And he has, like, you know, almost an eight hundred FICO. I said, why are you doing that? You know, I don’t know. That’s what they charge me, though. Right now I am repairing what his system is going out and getting him zero percent interest rate for 18 months. Balance transfers and charges, zero percent. Wow. That’s an HSBC Bank of the West. Discover has some of those and a few other big companies apply to them. Make sure you’re looking at an in balance transfer those interest rates that are high on to something to zero. Personally, for 10 years, I have paid this much in interest to credit card companies and I have run probably close to a half a million dollars through my credit cards at times, left 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 thousand dollars on credit cards for months on end. Zero interest, all at zero percent balance transfer. And when the time comes up, either balance, transfer it to a different card or I just paid it off in full. Right now, I’ve just been paying them off in full.

[00:36:05] Ok, so the idea is it’s a game. It’s a game of monopoly, and if you understand how to play the game, you’ll win, you’ll end up with Boardwalk and Park Place with hotels on it, and everybody will keep landing on them and you’ll win.

[00:36:24] It’s absolutely a game of credit is something that needs to be studied a little bit. You really need to understand how it works. And let me tell you, there’s tons of ways of finding out how it works. If you go to Experian, TransUnion, Equifax, go to their websites, they’ll always have learning centers teach you about the best way to handle credit. I’ve taught people credit over and over about how to understand how to increase your credit score. Increasing your credit score is a delicate balance between payment history, credit utilization, length of history, credit, make some inquiries. Obviously, the most important is your payment history. Do you make your payments on time? That’s thirty five percent of your score. And that could be a big whack if you even have one late, it could cost you literally one hundred points on your score. You don’t even know it. Yeah, but did you also know if you’ve been using your card for a long time and you and you screw up and you do have a date that you can pick up that phone and call that credit card company, and it’s almost an 80 percent chance that they will say, OK, as a goodwill gesture, we will remove the derogatory and we will remove the payment, the penalty, the thirty nine dollars we charge. You will waive that, too?

[00:37:45] Yeah, I’ve done that. I’ve done it before because I do pride ourselves and in not being late and sometimes even paying bills like. Right when they come in as well and on the off chance that for some reason, mostly what has happened is I pay the bills, my husband will hand me the bill and for some reason he missed getting me that bill that time. And then he’s like, well, how come it’s late? And I’m like, why? I didn’t give it to me. But he has because normally we have paid on time. He’s he was able to get just as you say, he was able to get that thing waived.

[00:38:19] And lirot what I do and what I’ve been teaching my wife to do, even though she does like you when the bill comes in, she pays it. I put one hundred percent of everything I did on auto draft, and I’ve never had a late payment, I don’t even have to think about it. I only have to do one thing, make sure my bank account has enough money to buy medicine.

[00:38:39] That’s important.

[00:38:41] So I just do it every so often. I just drop thousands of dollars into the bank account and I target all my credit card bills to one of two accounts if they’re a business. And I’ll send it to my business checking account. If it’s personal, I’ll send it to my personal bank account. I just make sure those two have money in it for the payments, right? Absolutely. And and again, the payments aren’t all that much. You can again, when you negotiate a zero percent interest on these cards and then you, quote unquote, put in a minimum payment.

[00:39:12] A five thousand dollar credit card with Mac spelled out, your payment is fifty dollars a month. That’s it, because there’s no interest as a minimum payment, one percent. Again, let it ride that way until the end. And then I’m sure you have money in the background to pay it off in full. I have probably saved twenty twenty five thousand dollars in interest payments, I didn’t have to pay because of the ability to understand how credit works.

[00:39:47] And that’s what I love, helping people and again, during this pandemic, I tell every single solitary person I always meet.

[00:39:56] Call your credit card companies up right now. Right now.

[00:40:01] And if you have an interest rate over 10 or 12 percent, tell them. I’m having an issue in the pandemic, and what is your new interest rate for the pandemic?

[00:40:11] I would imagine almost one hundred percent of them, at least for a period of time, will drop your interest rate down to around 12 percent, some unless I had one friend of mine who is in a hospital for three months with Colvard, what he told the credit card company he had covered. Yeah, they not only dropped his interest rate, they waived the three months worth of payments that he was in the hospital. That’s wiped it off, clean up his credit and said, we’re sorry you were sick. Yeah. So three months worth of credit card payments, they removed. They didn’t put it on his back and it was just waived that they dropped this interest rate. So, you know, anybody that’s had covered you call the credit card company said, you know, I was having a real struggling problem. I was in the hospital. I had covered for from this period to this period, a lot of them will go back and make some serious adjustments and help you out. And really well, this is a time of serious saying what the federal government is talking to lenders about mortgage payments. Some people haven’t making a mortgage payment. Eight months. Yeah, lenders are going. We can’t foreclose. We can’t do anything. But I can tell you when it’s over. You owe a lot of money. Some of them are doing forbearance programs, moving into the back end of the loan, and some of them are requiring it. If it’s only a few months that you make the payments up quickly. Right. To be sure you understand what your lender is going to do in your mortgage area. Same way with car payments. Same with anything that there’s a creditor involved where the federal government might have put some mandates down, saying you need to help these people, they have a problem. Yeah, absolutely. That swings into my debt area because when I’m working with people, my main thing is that I love to do debt settlements again.

[00:42:07] Way back when when I was doing these settlements, I realized that even though I got 40 years in real estate and I am still a licensed real estate broker and will be for the rest of my life.

[00:42:17] I’m grandfathered in by the Department of Real Estate for all sorts of different things, zero complaints here. So they love me. And the reality is came down I learned through negotiations how to deal because a lot of times clients are both my buyer and seller. So I negotiated both. Right. And at times I was a mortgage lender for 20 years. So I did the mortgages on it. And at times when I had my life insurance licence, I would put a life insurance policy on the on the main person. But I didn’t like life insurance that much. But my wife works for MassMutual. She handles all the insurance in the properties and all that sort of stuff. She’s incredible at it. All right. Why me?

[00:43:00] So I got back and I really start understanding the pandemic is causing a lot of people problems and they don’t know what to do.

[00:43:08] And have you ever heard the expression, you know, a deer in the headlights just frozen, right? All right. Well, that’s what happens to business owners right now. And they’re panicking out there and they’re lying to their creditors and they’re lying to their trade payables. Oh, I got money coming in. Soon as this thing is back on, I’ll get you paid in 30 days. I’ll do that.

[00:43:31] They lie. They lie and they lie. And what they did was they set themselves up to when they really need help. It’s that old expression. You cried wolf too many times and now the villagers don’t want to come out and help you. And it’s a real wolf. They’re.

[00:43:47] I always tell people from the beginning, when you make any type of connection with a new creditor, with a new supplier, stay in communication with that person and make a really good, friendly relationship with them at all times, because if something comes up. They can help you or they can hurt you if something comes up and you don’t make a few payments and you lie to them, they can cut you off.

[00:44:17] And maybe that particular piece of merchandise that they’re selling you critical to your business. Yeah.

[00:44:24] You’re not going to be able to go out and find another supplier if they’re going to check your history and your history isn’t really good at that moment in time. Right. So you’re not going to find other suppliers to easily fill up. So I actually go in and I tell people, never lie to if something is coming up, call them up, say, hey, guys, we have an issue here. We’re having a little trouble. And this is what the trouble is. We have a pandemic. We got shut down. Some of our employees got sick. This happened. This happened. And tell the truth, say, what can we do to help solve the problem between the two of us so that when I need the product, I can get you eventually paid. But right now I can’t. What do we do? Yeah, what it does, it is an expression of hot potato. You got the hot potato in your hand. Well, toss it to him. Yeah.

[00:45:16] Tell him you had the issue. Ask them always three questions. What can you do to help the situation between the two of us? Yeah, stay good. Right.

[00:45:29] And he’s going to say, well, I understand. Yeah, a lot of people are having this problem. We’re having problem with our creditors that we borrow money to buy our supplies with. What can we do? I mean, we might have to slow down how much we give you help you find more credit lines. What what is it we need to do to help you? So you stay in business. So you buy our product that we can make money to pay our suppliers.

[00:45:56] That’s where the negotiations come in.

[00:45:59] And I have stepped in numerous times in the companies that lost their key supplier, I say key, these guys were the only one that supplied a particular part for their company and they got cut off and they were hurt and bad and they couldn’t do anything.

[00:46:17] They called me and said, Paul.

[00:46:21] We don’t know what to do, so I found out everything about their company, what their assets were, what their income stream was, what their problems were, their internal communications, who was in charge, who made decisions.

[00:46:33] I learned all about the company so I can understand the philosophy, because when I talk to the creditor, I have to come up with a valid reason why we need to start working, doing business together and how we’re going to do.

[00:46:48] Well, I’ll tell you, I’ve had a couple of creditors when I picked up the phone.

[00:46:54] I’ve had to hold the phone out here as they start talking about my client. And I can’t use the words because it’s not allowed on public television. Sorry, but let me tell you. And they were angry, pissed off and violently, you know, vulgar language. Yeah. And that’s how they felt about my client because of the damage she did by lying and cheating and everything else they did. Yeah. So my job is to get on his side if I stay on my client’s side. I lost the negotiation game. Right. I have to be his friend.

[00:47:34] So sometimes I have to tell him, you know, I understand my client is a blankety blank. I got matter of fact, he’s one of the worst clients I have. And I’ll tell you, I don’t know what to do. He just he won’t he just screws up every time. But I’ll tell you why I’m here. He has employees. And if we don’t see this company, those employees will no longer have a job. And if his company goes under, you’re never going to see any of your money at all. It’s his history. What can we do to make this work? I know you hate them. I hate them. But I’m looking out after his employees and you’re your best interest. So what can we do? And I’ll give you a hint to all your trade, you guys out there that have this issue.

[00:48:19] And here’s how you settle it. And is the only way I said I go back to the creditor and say, I’ll tell you what, we want to buy your product. You need to sell your product.

[00:48:32] We will pay you cash, not a company check that will work cash or cashier’s check and will not only pay you for the full amount of the product you’re buying, but we’re going to add.

[00:48:47] A certain percentage of the debt that we owe you, in addition, so that you get cash flow, you get the full price for your product and we start whittling down your debt.

[00:49:02] That’s. When they heard that, one hundred percent said we can work it out. The only and last part of the negotiation is how much of that debt will you pay when you’re buying the product? Right.

[00:49:17] And that’s something based on your cash flow or how much profit you have in the product you might be able to see. Well, and again, a lot of times I had to say, if I buy one hundred dollars of stuff from you, I’ll give you one hundred and ten dollars. I’ll give you 10 percent of whatever it is. And that will knock you into my profit a little bit because it’s not a big deal.

[00:49:36] But if you have a big profit, might say, I’ll knock off five percent of what I owe, you know, for the next 20 deals that we buy in big amounts from you, we pay cash after 20 of them, you and I’ll be even you’ll have 20 deals paid for in cash and we can get back together doing business on a more friendly basis.

[00:49:58] All right. So if you have a business out there and you have issues like this, if you created the problem with the vendor, do not call him.

[00:50:08] Find somebody in your company who is a friendly person, who has a smile on your face to call them and say, hey, listen, I’m going to lose my job. We need to get this back. We don’t have this. My boss is like any blankety blank, but I don’t want to lose my job. And we came up with some ideas from the employees of How to Help You. And if we can do this, get you the cash and a little bit extra each month, it will save us. It’ll save the company. We saved the company. You’re going to get paid in the long run. What can we do and have the guy who has heart? Yeah, you’ve got to speak from the heart truth.

[00:50:48] And this is really important. And I, I can’t guarantee anything when I tell you you’re going to probably find one hundred percent acceptance in.

[00:50:59] All right, excellent. And after time, you’ll start building that report, but if you ever, ever lie to that guy again, it may not mean anything to.

[00:51:10] Oh yeah, you’re going to be in trouble.

[00:51:12] I’ve had one client who was so bad to his his customers are his creditors creditor called officers. I don’t care if I lose all my money, I’m bankrupting them. I’m going to sue him personally. This is what I’m going to take them and rip them. And he did. Unfortunately, he did, because, again, he lied to the wrong person. Yeah. And it could be devastating. And that’s what my holistic background came in. That’s how I learned how to read energies, how to read people, OK? And I understood that everything I said had to come from my heart if I just wasn’t negotiating. Well, I’ll give you this. You take that and they can feel it. It’s not real that there’s there’s no feeling behind it. It’s just a mechanical manipulation.

[00:52:01] Then they know something is going to happen in the future. But when I talk to him from my heart, say I have a client that’s really, really, really hurting my client, last credit card client that I took from, I saved them a hundred thousand dollars on his credit card bills. I came from the heart. They had a medical problem, but nobody knew it. They didn’t understand what had happened. And when I talk to the attorneys, they got it. They got my sincerity of what had happened. And under the laws, I don’t have to I don’t have to give them any documentation. They can’t even ask for it. Yeah, that was my word in a hardship letter. That’s changed their minds to give them what I got now that saved my clients one hundred thousand dollars. All right, awesome. This is how negotiations work in the real world. And there is a book out there by Chris Voss, and it says, Never split the difference. If you want a book that will keep you intrigued from the time you read it to the time you put it, I read it one day. I couldn’t put it down. The guy is one of the top FBI negotiators for hostage situations in the world. OK. Any time there’s a major hostage situation, they call him in. And he explains the stories of how you have to talk to somebody who’s strapped with a cloth around him, who’s got a gun and a hostage is head sitting in a plane with 15 other people and it’s ready to blow him and everybody up. All right. How do you get him to concede and walk out?

[00:53:38] All right. Well, we’ll have to get the book because I’ll put that in context. But we’re going to have to unfortunately, we’re out of time. I’m going to have to wrap up. So so someone wants to be able to get a hold of you have a website or what’s the best way for someone to the best way to get a hold of me?

[00:53:54] Just send it to my email address if I have to. You can choose Paul at Y’s Wealth Choices dot com. OK, WIC, Wealth Choices, dot com or my personal email. Just call Paul at Gmail.

[00:54:14] Ok, and just put in the top. You want links to Legal Shield or attorneys or ask me a question about how you work or structure and you can ask me any credit question. You can ask me any debt suddenly question. I will answer them all and will not charge you. If you want a consultation with me, I’ll give you the first hour free. Wonderful. I literally in one hour I can probably understand your entire business, what’s happening, the internal issues, and probably know how to negotiate what you’re going through in the best way. If I can do it, I will tell you you have an option, OK? There are some companies that have called in and here’s the biggest issue. They wait too long. OK, and the reason I say that is because they use up all their money. You have to have something for them, right? Even if it’s 10 cents in the dollar, if you don’t have the ten cents, you can’t make a settlement. Yeah. Oh, please don’t wait and just call Paul at Gmail or Paul at wise. Well, choices dot com. Either way, ask me any questions. I will send you links. I will answer your questions. If you have a serious business issue, I will consult with you for free for the first hour. And when I get done, you will know more about your own business than what you thought you knew. And that’s a promise.

[00:55:37] All right, awesome. Well, thanks so much for being here today. I really appreciate it. And thank you for listening, for watching. And until next time, as always, go out and live fully, love deeply and engage authentically.

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[00:56:21] Go to live, love, engage that gift. That’s live love. Engage dot g-i-f-t