Complaint Review: Morgan Drexen / JD Haas

I ended up with about 15,000 in debt when a certain MN dealer really messed over all of his employees. I believe in trying to pay off my debts and not just erase them if possible and just needed help making arrangements with all creditors. I contacted JD Haas / Morgan Drexen to help me try to settle my debts.

I entered into the program excited by the information that I had received but was soon questioning my decision. I have been paying them for over a year and a half for a total of over $3000.00 and found out that not only has all my money gone to nothing but fees but I have a garnishment that was just finished 1 month ago on an account that was was supposedly settled and paid for a year ago. I am currently being garnished on an account that I had made a payment arrangement with and was making payments on before joining the program. I was told by JD Haas / Morgan Drexen to stop making payments to that creditor as it would all be handled through them from now on. To make it worse, I paid check fees, monthly fees, and settlement fees on the account that is now a completed garnishment. I even got charged a second settlement fee on the garnishment that had nothing to do with anything that this company did.  

I called to cancel my contract and had to talk to 4 people. Two of the people that I talked to were helpful and sympathetic, 1 was pushy and kept trying to get me to use their bankruptcy service (for a fee) and 1 was just downright nasty and rude. The worst thing was that my last person was from accounting who told me that I still owe them over $1000.00 before my contract can be cancelled.

Basic breakdown on how really bad they are?  Flat fee $1500, monthly fee $65, settlement fee of 18% total owed for each settlement, $10 check fee to overnight the check (never told about that fee anywhere).

I will have paid $4500.00 to this company to pay off $1900 original debt (or $865 settled debt). If you figure in the garnishment that totaled $1300 that was supposedly already paid and the ongoing garnisment that has already paid over $1350 when the original debt was only $955 (and I still have another 200.00 to 400.00 to go), This will total over $7150.

I ran the numbers of total to total, my total bills were 15500.00 and if I had stayed with the program for the 72 months and received their "large discount" settlement offers and still made the same payments, my total saved??  $725.00 ....and this is not including already having "saved" $1000 on settling 3 accounts.

I will be contacting the Attorney General and making a complaint with the BBB. On a side note complaint (but still the same one), I am including Midland Credit and Messereli & Kramer PA for having been paid twice for the same account and not notifying me about the error but sending a letter to JD Haas telling them that it had been paid.

JD Haas / Morgen Drexen / Meserreli & Kramer PA / and Midland Credit you are really messing with peoples lives. I want, as do many people, to be able to pay my bills on time. Sometimes through no fault of our own, things happen. People lose their jobs, have an illness or accident, a divorce or even a death. When things like these happen it can easily set someone back so that they forced to be late or even unable to pay the bills beyond shelter, food, gas and water. If like me, you can find a job but at a loss of over 50% of my income, we do what we can when we can. It is people and companies like you that make everyone afraid and/or hostile when dealing with creditors.