THE Cambridge Connection - Episode 50

We’ve faced hard times, there’s no doubt about it, but it’s all about how to get through it and how to prosper. I know I mentioned on the show there’s a statistic on one of the poll sites that say 25% of people right now are afraid to open their credit card bills, and why is that? We’ve talked about this, and we’ve had to deal with this. The economy is still in question. Things have, you know, gas has come down, so there are some positive indicators, but there are some headlines, and statistically, remember, if I remember in our dialogue, the trigger points at Cambridge Credit Counseling as a counselor were right after Labor Day when people come out of the summer, they’ve spent a lot of money, and then right after the new year, right?

After Christmas, yes. 15 trillion in household debt. Unbelievable. And that’s Q2. Q3 is the summer.

So again, not doom and gloom, people are now getting back to school, we’re getting into the fall, the holidays are coming around the corner, it’s time to make some plans. And hopefully everyone had a chance to finally enjoy their summer, and I’m sure credit cards were used for vacations, and we preached, you know, don’t buy it if you can’t afford it. But hey, it is what it is. Absolutely. And being in that spirit, our budget for the anniversary show is $0.

We don’t have any party favors or hats or anything like that. We will survive. But maybe next year. Maybe next year we’ll make that something to consider in planning. Absolutely.

All right, so we’re going to take a quick break, and right back we’re going to be here with Christopher Viale, the President and CEO of Cambridge Credit Counseling. This is Gordon Oliver with The Cambridge Connection. We’ll be right back. With a rise in prices for gas and other expenses crushing your budget, Cambridge’s typical clients save $140 per month while paying down their credit card debt at much lower interest rates. Call 1-800-CAMBRIDGE.

Interview with Cambridge CEO on debt landscape

Welcome back, everyone, to The Cambridge Connection. I’m your host, Gordon Oliver, here with our one-year anniversary show with my co-pilot, Tina Marie. Hi, Tina Marie. Hey, Gordon. And it is my pleasure and privilege to introduce our special guest, President and CEO of Cambridge Credit Counseling.

What’s up, Christopher? How you doing, Gordon? Thanks for having me. Hey, Chris. Hi, Tina.

We’re very, very glad to have you. You know, it’s funny. We talk with our producer, Lisa, about how to be positive about some of the things we talk about, which can be perceived somewhat negatively. Obviously, the economy’s in a weird time. And having our one-year anniversary right after Labor Day, when people seemingly are starting to wake up that they have some debt to deal with, this show’s been about financial wellness.

It’s been about financial wisdom and empowerment. And thanks to you, we’ve been able to continue the show. So thank you so much for that. No, it’s great. What you guys do for the show and the guests that we bring on and the partners, I mean, it’s really a fantastic thing.

Thank you. Thank you. So as the President and CEO of Cambridge Credit Counseling, can you give us your 30,000-foot view of what’s going on right now? So it’s tough. It’s tough out there for consumers.

We all know that consumers’ price points for everything are much higher. Coming out of the pandemic, people are spending a little bit more than they’re used to because they were on lockdown for so long. And now credit card debt’s massing to points that we’ve never seen before. This summer, July and August generally are the slowest times for people reaching out for help with their credit card debt. And this summer, we had more calls coming in for people looking for help than we’ve had prior to the pandemic during the July and August timeframes.

So people are really starting to feel it. And now that we’re coming into school season, that’s generally when people pay attention to debt they might have amassed. And that’s where we’re at right now. Yeah. You know, everybody seems to focus a lot on gas as the trigger of how we’re doing, right?

The gas prices have come down a bit. But what we always talk about is the cost of living in and of itself in the home, energy, groceries. Everybody, I hear it almost every day, some conversation about, I walked out of the grocery with four things and spent X amount of dollars and can’t believe it. Yeah, it’s crazy. And we talk about the gas prices coming down a little bit.

50 for leaded. So they come down a few cents. Not to mention the diesel fuel for all transportation of goods is still really high. So it just has an impact. And again, that is the purpose of this show.

For people that don’t really know where to turn, it’s just to raise some awareness that there is some very effective help out there if you’re struggling with anything regarding to household debt. Absolutely. Companies like Cambridge Credit Council, nonprofits, there are several of us out there that are national. We’re all good at what we do. People just have to be careful that they don’t fall subject to the for-profit side of this industry that does a lot of advertising.

They’re on the radio, they’re on the TV, they’re on the internet, they’re everywhere. They control what people see and hear about debt relief options. And a lot of those companies are only in this business to make money off people and not help people. So that’s why we have to address it. It could seemingly be negative.

It could feel like this is something that isn’t a hot topic to talk about. But the last thing you want is to have somebody make decisions based on some advertising that’s just dubious at best about steps they can take when they really don’t help, they actually hurt in the long run. Absolutely. And that’s something I’d like to point out as far as the counselors at Cambridge Credit Counseling. We’re not paid on commission, we’re not sales people where when they go to these other companies, these settlement companies, nine times out of 10, the person that they’re speaking with is a salesperson, not a counselor, not looking out for the consumer’s best interest, but their own best interest.

That’s the trick. There are some companies out there that do very good work, but in the for-profit space, the majority of that area is to make money, not really to help people. Exactly. So, that said, you’re the leader of one of the trade associations, and you’re in the industry, you’ve got your pulse or your ear on the ground for what’s coming up. Is there any feeling from all of the people in collaboration that this is the worst time credit counseling agencies are ever gonna see for people?

Yeah, yeah. We’re all talking about gearing up and staffing up. We’re hiring people at Cambridge left and right right now just to be prepared for the avalanche of people that are going to need a good service, and that’s across the board. There are 50 or so agencies in our industry in the nonprofit side, and all the CEOs talk and collaborate together, and we’re all preparing for what’s next. And isn’t Cambridge Credit Counseling one of the largest HUD-approved housing counseling agencies?

Yes, absolutely, and we do an awful lot on that side, too. So, it’s not just credit card debt. If people are struggling with their mortgage payments or rent payments, there are programs that are available to assist people there, too. Again, our industry, our nonprofit industry, is made up of individuals, leaders, and counselors that are all in this business to help people. That’s what it’s all about, helping people.

Junior Achievement and youth financial literacy

So, Christopher, thank you again for joining us today, and part of the special of this anniversary show is bringing on a couple of guests that really are on the same path of helping people. And who better than Jennifer Connelly, the president of Junior Achievement of Western Mass, helping K through 12 kids to learn about financial wellness and financial wisdom. Hi, Jennifer. Hi, how are you? I’m doing great, how are you?

Very good, thank you. Jennifer, nice to have you. Thank you, nice to have you back. Nice to be back. School’s starting, so we’re back in session.

Yeah, and thanks to the president and CEO of Cambridge Credit Counseling, we’re able to hit our one-year anniversary and continue the show. Obviously, the economic times, we’re in, yeah, we’re so excited to be able to continue. And, you know, the economy’s in weird shape, so it’s helpful to bring financial wisdom and wellness and topics of information that will help people. But can you just, as our guest again, quickly tell our listeners about what you do, helping children, and what you think of the Cambridge Connection? Thank you very much.

, in 1919. And since then, we’ve been working with young people, first at middle school and high school, and now K through 12, to teach financial literacy, entrepreneurship, and career exploration, and workforce readiness. And all of that ties into being able to understand how to work with your finances, from, you know, signing up when you get your first job, do you have to sign up for the matching things with 401Ks or 403Bs, how do you budget for your monthly expenses, all of those things. So we start with the smallest, what’s a want and a need, all the way up to a teen reality fair, where they’re 25 years old and have to go out, balance a budget, including housing and transportation and fun. It was fun, I actually attended that.

Yeah, I was actually a counselor at that fair. I really enjoyed it. You, Cambridge Credit has been huge with us being able to, staffing for our credit counseling booth, because after the students go through all of the booths and make some choices, you generously talk with each one of them about, well, you know, really, you can’t take your car payment out of your savings account every month. Right. Those type of things.

And so we’re very fortunate to be able to work with you and other businesses and nonprofits in the area who share their wisdom and their knowledge. And sometimes they share their challenges. You know, well, look at me, I got a car that was really expensive and I had a bad driving record, so now my car insurance is $6,000, things that they need to think about before they make some purchases. No more important work than what you’re doing to help our youth learn and understand about financial wisdom and financial wellness. And thank you, Jennifer, for joining us.

Obviously, we have some updates to ask you about and love to have you as a guest on again in the near future about the podcast that was being created and that new section that’s being created in your office. So we’d love to have you back on the show in the near future. Absolutely. All right, ladies and gentlemen. Well, congratulations.

It’s a wonderful job. Thank you very much. Jennifer Connolly, the president of Junior Achievement of Western Massachusetts. We’re going to take a quick commercial break. This is The Cambridge Connection.

I’m your host, Gordon Alva. We’ll be right back with some more guests. And now it’s a good time to celebrate Junior Achievement of Western Mass and its president and our good friend, Jennifer Connolly. You may not know that Junior Achievement was actually born in Springfield back in 1919. Since then, their mission has been the same, to provide financial literacy and career exploration opportunities to young people, helping them make the link between what they learn in school and real life.

Scam prevention with Scamicide guest

Thanks to Jennifer Connolly and her staff and crew of volunteers, JA of Western Mass now reaches more than 13,000 students every year. org or call 747-7670. Welcome back, everyone, to The Cambridge Connection. I’m your host, Gordon Oliver, here with co-pilot Tina Marie, CEO and President of Cambridge Credit Counseling, Christopher Vialli. And on the line, we have our special guest, Steve Weissman from Scamicide.

Steve, welcome to the show again. Oh, it’s great to be with you again. Thank you so much. Listen, the work that you do to try to protect people from being scammed is just so important. And I know the folks over at Cambridge Credit Counseling have been sharing a lot of your stories in your posts.

Can you tell the listeners a little bit about Scamicide? Yes, Scamicide, we’re actually celebrating our 10th year. And it’s more than, close to 4,000 individual scams of the day. And so whatever is coming up in the world of scams, identity theft, or cyber security, we’re there warning people about what to look for, how to protect themselves, and what to do. And it’s been pretty good.

We’ve been ahead of the curve on a lot of things, like SIM swapping and ransomware, and all kinds of scams. Right now, we’re talking a lot about the college loan forbearance. The scams are popping up all over the place with that. So it’s kind of one-stop shopping. Opportunity is knocking for that.

Steve, we have the president of Cambridge Credit Counseling, Christopher Viale, here. He was talking, Chris, obviously about services that are for profit, that are advertising to lure people in to do certain things. And there’s quite the correlation between what Steve does to protect consumers and the information you try to get out there to try to protect consumers. Make sure people are making sound decisions. No, absolutely.

Yeah, Steve, the work you do is fantastic. I do have a question for you. With more and more people working from home, do you find that consumers are going to be more vulnerable to some of these scams? You know, this is one of my mottos is things aren’t as bad as you think, they’re far worse. And so the pandemic was open season for scammers.

And with so many people working remotely, not only are they more susceptible to being scammed, often with communications and phishing and spear phishing, they think are coming from work. But even the companies for which they work are in danger because people will get into these companies’ computers, the back door, they’ll be going in by way of the employees. Interestingly enough, I wrote an op-ed recently in The Hill about how vulnerable our municipal water supplies are to cyber attacks. And one of the problems that we’ve seen, including at an attack in Florida, was workers who are working remote, they get hacked. And through them, the hackers managed to get to the computers, in that case of the water supply.

So, yeah, the pandemic and remote working has opened up a lot more vulnerability to scams. That’s the kind of information, Steve, again, we would love to have you on the show. Again, because scams never end. There are always newer ones to bring into the fold. So this is our one-year anniversary, and we want to thank you for calling in and helping us celebrate it.

And we’d love to have you on again to bring some more valuable information to help protect consumers. Yeah, anytime. I’m just a real big fan of your work and what you do to help people with their finances. The financial world is pretty damn complicated and scary, and you guys do a great job of really educating and helping people manage. So I’m happy to be a part of it.

Thanks, Steve. Thank you, Steve. We definitely look forward to having you back on again. Up next for our one-year anniversary show, we have special guest and previous guest on the show, Elizabeth Karwowski-Sedoukos. How are you, Elizabeth?

Creditvolve mortgage readiness partnership

Great. How are you guys? Doing great. Elizabeth is the CCO and co-founder of Creditvolve, and I’m going to quickly just turn it over. We’ve got the CEO of Cambridge Credit Counting.

So Christopher, you’re working with Creditvolve and Elizabeth on a major project. Is that right? Oh, we are, and we’re so excited. We were introduced to Elizabeth and Jeff Walker and their team probably about maybe two years ago, and this has been a work in progress, and now we’re lifting up a mortgage-ready program that is going to help so many consumers. It’s just an incredible time.

So Elizabeth, that being said, can you tell us a little bit about Creditvolve? I’m excited to share, and thank you again for having me on your one-year anniversary. What an exciting time for you and for consumers to be able to get such great information from you guys. Absolutely. Creditvolve, we are a technology platform that provides the necessary digital resources to consumers and to our partners in order, as Chris mentioned, to help consumers become mortgage-ready.

So what does that mean? It’s literally bringing all the cool technology into the counseling world, into the world of the lenders, and letting the consumer get the necessary information, education to get their budget in line, get their documents in line, get their credit in line in order to become a homeowner or refinance and actually save money. You know, a common denominator of the guests that are calling in today and celebrating with us, but even just the show across the year, is offering information to consumers that are truly going to help them, and the fact that you can hear it in your voice, Christopher obviously has been in the industry for so long and working on one theme, and that’s helping consumers get to a better place financially. So it’s incredible. With fintech these days and some of the applications that are coming out to help people, and Creditvolve is obviously, from what I’ve seen and studied, incredible.

We’re really excited because it makes the process from, you know, a consumer, what we like to say, not yet, when they go to a lender and the lender starts the pre-qualification process and unfortunately they might not be ready, their finances might not be ready, their credit might not be ready, we say, don’t say no, just not yet. It’s just slightly a different journey to help guide that consumer. And with the partnership, as Chris mentioned, with Cambridge, having the counselors that have the warmth, the heart, the energy, the excitement, giving the hope to consumers, plus the technology that we provide, it’s a win-win for all parties involved. Look, it’s simple, right Christopher? The housing department, you’ve got first-time homebuyer counseling, there’s all the things, if you’re not ready for a mortgage or the mortgage companies are telling you you’re not ready, a program to be able to help a consumer get ready is just incredible.

Yeah, absolutely. To Elizabeth, why say no? It’s really just not yet. It’s not yet. If that consumer really wants to work toward it, we can help guide them.

It only takes three to six months to get them in line and then they can achieve exactly what they were looking to do. So it’s just, we’re really excited. I’ve actually hired eight HUD counselors in the last two weeks to just prepare for this launch. Supremely important jobs for today’s times, today’s economics. Yep.

We’re definitely, again, Cambridge Credit Counseling is a sponsor of the show. Elizabeth, we definitely want to have you back on the show to talk more about this product and this partnership because I don’t think enough can be said about how helpful this union is of helping people get into a mortgage properly. Well, I’d love to, and thank you so much for having me because we haven’t even talked about how much savings this brings to a consumer by being knowledgeable, by understanding what Cambridge and Credit Ball bring to the table. I mean, we’re talking about not a few hundred, but thousands of thousands of dollars on a yearly basis and over a lifetime. I just did a quick calculator just to share with you guys real fast.

We did a calculator for a consumer and by increasing their score a little over 40 points, she is saving $62,998 over the lifetime of her loan. So this is thousands of dollars and I’d love to share more about that. But again, thank you so much for inviting me to be at this exciting moment for you guys. Thank you. You and Jeff and your team are incredible people.

It’s a pleasure to have you on here. We’ll definitely have you on back again. And thank you for the great work that you do and what you’re doing with Cambridge Credit Counseling. Thank you. Now we have special guest John Mayock from One Boston Financial.

Financial advisor on retirement planning

John, welcome back to The Cambridge Connection. Gordon, it’s great to be back. Hi, John. So nice having you back. So on our anniversary show, we’ve been celebrating all of the great guests we’ve had on and all the great work we’re all doing together to help consumers get to a better place financially.

So can you just remind people what it is that you do? Of course. Yes. I’m a financial advisor with One Boston Financial Group and I work with individuals and families to work toward financial independence and help them secure a retirement. and the lifestyle that they choose.

You know, it’s funny that when, when people graduate off of a debt management program, we talk about all the time finding different ways and different things that people can do once they are out of debt and having the right strategies as you get into retirement, it, it seems like a long haul when you’re young, but you get there kind of fast. So the work that you do is truly incredible. And let, you know, when you were on, you, you talked about the economy and that wisdom just from you for many years, being able to help people through different economic cycles was just so great and so impactful for people that listened to the show. Oh, I’m glad to hear that. And you know, it’s, it’s, it’s important, um, stuff for people to know and just to have understand and just have some perspective when, you know, it can be overwhelming.

Look at the economy. If you, if you’re not, you don’t understand it well and don’t understand how markets move and everything like that, it can, people can react very emotionally. And it’s good to have somebody around that can help you put things in perspective and, um, help you make logical decisions and what can be very emotional times. Yeah. And interesting times.

We have the CEO of Cambridge Credit Counseling here. And one of the things we were talking about, John, was that the times that we’re in on, on credit card debt and household debt are just unprecedented, right, Chris? Yeah. It’s, um, you just consumer debt overall is just incredible how much it’s risen over the past couple of quarters. Consumers are going to have a really difficult time coming into early next year, if not earlier than that.

And that’s why John getting you on to give your wisdom and your insight, um, on the advisory side on dealing with the economy. One of the things we talk about on the show is no doom, no gloom. You’ve got to have a plan no matter where you’re at. So between the work you do, the work that Jennifer Connelly from junior achievement does to help K through 12, the work that Credit Evolve does to help people that aren’t mortgage ready yet. And the amazing work, um, that Cambridge Credit Counseling does to work on getting consumers great information and Steve Weissman with Scamicide.

This is a great team of people we’ve had on this show in this past year. We can’t thank you enough, uh, for coming on. Well, I just think it’s incredible and I appreciate that, but I think it’s incredible that you’re at a year. I think that the congratulations are in order there. I remember, uh, well, long, far longer, uh, farther back than that, you were planning this and, you know, discussing it with me and other, some other of our associates.

And, uh, I just think it’s a great venture and I’m excited for you and I’m really happy that, uh, you know, you had such a great first year. I’m really looking forward to hearing more from the second year. Thanks, John. And we’d love to have you on as a guest again, for sure. Oh, please.

I’d be happy to do it. Thanks, man. You have a great day. All right. You too.

And everybody there at Cambridge and Cambridge Connection, congratulations. Thanks, John. All right, folks. Have a great day. You too.

All right. A special thanks, Christopher Vialli. Thank you for joining us again for our one year celebration. We appreciate having you here. Thanks, Gordon.

Baseball and closing banter

Thanks, Tina. The work that you guys do a great job. Thank you very much. And Tina, can you believe it? Now we have to, the celebration is over.

I’m telling you 28 minutes just isn’t enough. There’s too much education out there that we, we really have to touch on. All right. All that said, we’re both giant fans. I’m putting you on the spot.

This is the first NFL Sunday. Yep. On the spot. Eli Mann is going to the hall of fame. We know it, right?

Yes. Single season record in the playoffs of yardage. So who you got this weekend? Giants? Of course.

Let’s go Giants. Of course, Gordon. I can’t bet against my team. Let’s go Giants. All right, everyone.

I’m going to end with a quote as I always do. Success is not how high you’ve climbed, but how you make a positive difference on the world. Roy T. Bennett. m.

Show credits and sign off

A huge thank you to our producers, Leah and Lisa, for helping us put the show on and get past this one year anniversary. We can’t thank you enough. As you see, we have great experts on this show. com and click on podcasts. And you can listen to any of the past shows that we’ve done and future ones after they’ve aired.

Or you can also go to where you listen to your favorite podcasts. And once again, be part of the conversation. org or feel free to call.