1182: China, Looming Asset Shortage & Debt Cleanse: How to Settle Your Unaffordable Debts for Pennies on the Dollar by Jorge Newbery

Communication has been just fantastic. And even after leasing a property, Platinum Properties has kept in contact to check everything's okay.

Welcome to the Creating wealth show with Jason Hartman. You're about to learn a new slant on investing, some exciting techniques and fresh new approaches to the world's most historically proven asset class that will enable you to create more wealth and freedom than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine, self made multimillionaire who's actually been the and done it. He's a successful investor, lender, developer and entrepreneur who's owned properties in 11 states, had hundreds of tenants, and been involved in thousands of real estate transactions. This program will help you follow in Jason's footsteps on the road to your Financial Independence Day. You really can do it. And now here's your host, Jason Hartman with the complete solution for real estate investors.

Welcome to episode 1182. 1182. Thank you so much for joining me today. I am coming to you from Guangzhou, China. And for the last little over a week, I've been traveling around South Korea and China, and it's been a very enlightening trip. I'm here with my girlfriend Carmen, who you've heard on the show before. She has been to China many times, invited me along on this trip. South Korea was country number 82 for me and China or mainland China. I have been to Hong Kong before. Is country number 83 now? Why do I say that? You might be asking. Well, when I went to Hong Kong, it was a British territory. Now it is part of China. Eh, sort of, I guess, you know, it kind of depends on how you look at it. Hong Kong's treated as a distinctly different place. As most of you know, even the Internet is different there. It's not censored like it is here in China. So, yeah, it's been an interesting trip. Carmen, wow. What do you think so far? You haven't been to South Korea. It was your first time there?

Yeah, that was the first time. So that was interesting. I definitely enjoyed not only the city, but going to the border with North Korea. That was fun.

That was really fascinating. Going to the dmz, the demilitarized zone. And we learned a lot that day, didn't we?

Yeah, yeah, that was very interesting. And we actually could see North Korea from where we were standing. So that was, that was very cool.

It's so interesting that a place like North Korea, the, the prison kingdom of the world, the most isolated country on earth by a long shot, North Korea is really, really fascinating. I have always been fascinated. In fact, I think I Told you this before, but when they first came out with the Retina display on the iPad. Now, this was maybe, what, six years ago or so. The first thing I did when I got my new iPad is I went to Google Earth and I looked at Pyongyang, North Korea, because I am so fascinated by that place. It's just so. It's like the closest you can get to going to another planet. It really is just so isolated and out there. It's just quite fascinating. And what were some of the things we learned on that trip? Well, remember when we went to the place where they said, be careful of landmines?

Yes, yes. And there were signs everywhere with little skeletons.

Yeah. Don't walk here, you might get blown up. Right. They said there were more than 2 million landmines there. And this was not really in the DMZ area, which. The DMZ, I guess, let me see if I remember, was 160 miles long and two and a half miles deep. That's just the demilitarized zone. And it is high, high security. Very interesting. We also went to that railroad station that was built. I mean, a really nice railroad station that basically doesn't operate. It has a train once a week that doesn't go to North Korea. But in the future, it is planned, this railroad will travel between north and South Korea. And they built it just as, like, a peace offering to unify the Korean peninsula. I thought that was pretty fascinating that this train station was built really to use someday in the future.

Yeah, that's. Yeah. I think South Korea in general, they're just trying to either prepare for, you know, a happy future. How about. What do you think of that area where they have a theme park right at the border?

I know, I know. That was funny. And they said. Remember, the tour guide told us that that was like. Because it's so tense at the border, that they wanted to have a happy place.

They just wanted spread happiness. That was great.

It was. It was interesting. But, you know, one of the other things that has struck me on this trip in general, not about north and South Korea, but Asia in particular, and I guess China the most is the level of wealth here. Now, tonight we went to your favorite Turkish ice cream place, which. Yeah. In China, a Turkish place. And you had been to another branch of that same Turkish place, what's called motto. Yeah. And that ice cream was good. I'm not an ice cream fan. I know you are.

Yes.

She likes ice cream, folks. Anyway, so we went to this place, and afterwards we wandered around this sort of mall there. And there are all these malls and all this retail shopping here. And we went into Jimmy Choo, Hermes, Polo, Hugo Boss, Emporio, Armani. I mean, designer, designer, designer everywhere. Really expensive stuff. And this stuff costs more here than it does in the U.S. now, I don't exactly know why or you know, how these brands operate and do all this stuff. It's really amazing that people can afford that here because there is a real class difference. Taking a taxi ride for 20 minutes will cost you about 5, 3, $4. So that's cheap. Going out to dinner is really inexpensive. We have stayed in some gorgeous hotels in South Korea. We stayed in the Plaza Hotel. That was, that was beautiful. We stayed in the Shangri La in Beijing and that was gorgeous too. We went to the Great Wall of China. Your second time there.

My second time. But still equally impressive.

Yeah, yeah, that's, that's pretty amazing. And now we are in the Sheridan in Guangzhou, which is a beautiful Sheridan. This is really just a gorgeous hotel. And something that struck me is the author Jim Rogers and hedge fund manager who's been on the show, I think three or four times over the years. You've seen Jim Rogers on tv, he's written some great books including Investment Biker, Adventure Capitalist. I highly recommend Adventure Capitalist. It's a little old now, but still fascinating. If you like traveling, if you like knowing about the world and you're interested in capitalism and different stock markets and economies around the world. Adventure Capitalist is a fascinating book. Jim Rogers is a great writer and he's the guy on TV you always see wearing the bow tie and he moved to Singapore and he has his kids learning Mandarin Chinese and he thinks, you know, that Asia is the future, blah, blah, blah. Regardless of all that, one of the comments that struck me that Jim said years ago in his book A Bull in China was the name of the book is that if you're a Westerner and if you think you know what a luxury hotel is or luxury treatment of any kind, and you go to la, San Francisco, New York, you know, Miami, and you stay in a five star hotel and you compare that to a five star hotel in Asia especially, I'd say, well, China, Singapore, Japan, any of those at least, it's just a total difference. I mean, the way people wait on you here, especially at the Shangri La where we stayed in Beijing, I mean, honestly, that was a little annoying. I thought the way they waited on us, they were too attentive, you know.

Yeah, we had people following us everywhere, just, you know, going in the elevator and just taking us to the room.

Seriously, as if we. As if we are incapable of pushing an elevator button and holding the elevator door. But it's really nice the way they sort of see you out. You know, you're leaving the hotel lounge up on the top of the hotel, and they show you to the elevator, they see you out and. And they meet you there to escort you in. You know, it's really something. And, you know, I've been to Asia before and, you know, I stayed at the Mandarin Oriental I remember, in Bangkok and some beautiful hotels in Malaysia before, and years ago, and. And it was like that, you know, you had the butler right outside your door and stuff. But the level of labor attention here, because labor is cheap, right? And so, you know, in the U.S. you know, a lot of things are. Are more automated. They're leaving more to automation. But here the labor is cheap. So you can really get a lot of is. It's nice. You know, what about these economies? What about the. We'll talk about the Canton Fair for a minute. So you come here because you're in the e commerce business, and you took me to the Canton Fair yesterday, and I couldn't believe it. I mean, that is the biggest fair in the world. You know, bigger than ces, the Consumer Electronics Show. I went to that in Vegas a couple years ago with some of our Venture alliance members. You just go around and meet all of these different manufacturers and manufacturers reps and look for products to sell online. Right? Yeah.

I think saying that the Canton Fair is just an event is an understatement. I think it's a very small city of just vendors and suppliers and manufacturers. So it caters the entire world. You meet people from everywhere in the world, and you pretty much just, you know, walk around and see all kinds of products. Everything that exists in this world is probably displayed on that.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely. You know, one of the things I said many years ago is that the world is awash in goods. In the old days, goods were scarce. And, you know, you'd give your stuff away to Salvation army or Goodwill or some charity and, you know, you think, well, people need these T shirts and these old slacks I'm giving away nowadays. There's just goods everywhere. Manufacturing has become so efficient that there's. There's just lots of goods. I couldn't believe it. Every color of everything at the Canton Fair. Every, you know, zillions of pieces of silverware, teapots, coffee. I mean, like, I couldn't even describe it. Everything under the sun. And I was only there for, like, three hours.

Yeah.

Yeah. That was unbelievable. It really was. Yeah.

So, Jason, I'm curious, though. Obviously, you've studied these economies and know a lot about it, but now you've been here and you have experience, you know, from a taxi drive to Chinese airlines and food, and, you know, you've seen it. So has your perception changed at all? I mean, how. How do you see things now that you've been here and experience it yourself?

Well, it definitely has changed. And one of the things I am amazed at is. Is just how massive this is. When we got to Beijing, I could not believe the density of housing. You know, it really is like my mother said, she came to China maybe 15 years ago, and she said, jason, when you're coming in on the plane and you look out the window. Well, first of all, when I looked out the window when we were coming into Beijing, I couldn't see anything because it was so polluted, but it did rain and it clear and. And we saw it on the way out. It's like looking at seven New York cities. It's just massive, these high rises everywhere and just housing, you know, thousands and thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people. These cities are ginormous. It's incredible. The scale and the size and the number of people just everywhere. There's just so many people. Well, about a billion, three of them, to be exact. So, you know, nearly. Well, about four times the size of the United States. But these cities are just huge. The enormity of it is really something that impressed me.

I remember last year I came here with my business partner, and we came here to this same place we are now, Guangzhou, which she's never heard of before we came here. And soon she realized this city is actually the size of New York.

Yeah, yeah, right. It's unbelievable. It's just something in the. The beautiful skyscrapers everywhere and the side. The number of stories. I mean, they're. They're huge. It's quite something. But, you know, I will say it reminds me of something that I talked about 15, 16 years ago in my Creating wealth seminar. My first seminar, which was. Is a comment that it was a Milken Institute that's, you know, the junk bond king, Michael Milken, who served some time for his Drexel Burnham Lambert junk bond dealings in the day, years ago. It reminds me of something that he and he and Jeremy Siegel wrote this article talking about the looming asset shortage. And I think that Jeremy Siegel's point was very, very prescient and I think every real estate investor listening to this show ought to very happy with themselves and their decision to be real estate investors. Because what Jeremy Siegel talked about is he talked about the rising middle class around the world. And you definitely see that here in China. I mean, another thing I've noticed is that, you know, I think of all these service people I'm running into here, every waiter and waitress and bellman and hotel manager, and I think, you know, a lot of these people, people probably spent their childhood in rural China and on some poverty stricken farm in a poverty stricken lifestyle. And now they're in a city. Moving up, moving up, moving up. And globalization has lifted well over 300 million people out of poverty. And so this says that there is an asset shortage looming. All these people as they are starting to earn money and their economies are growing and they will just consume more assets. And guess what those assets are? They are food, clothing and shelter, the three basic human needs. But they are also all of the ingredients of all the human needs. And so if you own properties, and those properties are made of those ingredients, we talk about a lot. Copper wire, glass, steel, lumber, concrete, petroleum products, all of those ingredients are just going to be consumed more and more. And when you look at the, the massive size of these cities and remember when George Gilder spoke at Meet the Masters just what, three, four weeks ago now, and he showed those pictures of, of Shenzhen, China, and we're going there tomorrow, right?

Yes, Shenzhen.

Yeah, well, however you pronounce it. Okay, however you pronounce it. So. And he showed those pictures and that was just over the course of what, 20 years or something. I mean, it showed the pictures of the city's development. It was unbelievable.

Yes.

I mean, the amount of ingredients, the amount of assets it takes to develop these places is truly amazing. And as real estate investors, you own all those assets, you own all of those, what I call packaged commodities. So be very proud of yourself for owning those resources. And guess what? You only put one fifth of the money into the deal. The bank put the rest in. The other 80% came up, that came from the bank. And the tenants are paying the bank back for you. So it's the ultimate, ultimate arbitrage. We've got a lot more of our trip to talk about on the upcoming episodes this week, and we'll do that. But you know what, we've got to get to our guests today because we do have a guest.

Okay, great.

You know we have a guest, right?

Yes, I know.

Hey.

Hey folks here. I gotta mention, it's almost 11, 11 o' clock at night here, so we're a little punchy. We just had some ice cream so we're gonna get to sleep here soon. Yeah. Our guest today is a returning guest, George Newberry, and he is the author of a book called Debt Cleanse. He talks about his story and I think you'll enjoy that today as we dive into that topic. Let's get to our guest. It's my pleasure to welcome a returning guest back to the show and that is George Newberry. He is founder of and CEO of Debt Cleanse. Founder of American Homeowner Preservation, otherwise known as ahp, a socially responsible hedge fund which purchases non performing mortgages from banks at discounts, then shares the discounts with families to settle their mortgages at terms many borrowers find too good to be true. He's a renowned debt and real estate investor, endurance athlete and best selling author of Burn Zones. He was on the show talking about that before. But today we're going to focus on Debt Cleanse. How to settle your unaffordable debts for pennies on the dollar and not pay some at all. George, welcome back. How are you?

Great. Thanks for having me back, Jason.

You know, debt is kind of a confusing topic. Oddly. It doesn't seem like it should be confusing. It seems like it should just be simple. Right. If you're going to borrow money, you got to pay it back. But there's really a lot more nuance to it than that, isn't there?

I'd have to agree.

Yeah, there sure is. Because it's a complicated world in which we live. And, you know, you've probably read this book. I finished it a while back and it's called the first 5,000 years. It was absolutely fascinating. I've not interviewed the author, but it really points out, as do you, how some of these debts are really quite unfair and unscrupulous. And when the Great Recession broke out and everybody was complaining about predatory lending, my first reaction to that was I kind of scoffed and I said, oh, that's ridiculous. Just pay your bills, you know. But really when you understand what's going on at a higher level, it's just not that simple, is it?

Absolutely. It's. In many cases, families and small business owners are peddled predatory financial products which in many cases set the borrowers up to fail. So debt on itself or credit products in and of themselves can be good things, but when they're marketed and designed and created in a predatory manner, that's not a good thing.

It's kind of like the food supply almost where, you know, you might say, well, if you don't want to be overweight, then be more responsible, eat more carefully. Right. Which is true on its face, there's no question about that. Look, I'm into health, I eat, I think very responsibly and I'm not overweight, you know. But it's more complicated than that. There really are forces outside of oneself, you know, access to the right capital, access to education, access to the right food. I mean, in some poor areas they have a term I only recently became familiar with called food deserts, where literally you can't access decent food. It is very difficult. The same is true of financial products in a lot of these cases, isn't it?

Absolutely. And some of those same neighborhoods that are food deserts are plagued with pay.

Here, payday loans, car lots.

Yeah, payday loans, auto title loans. Absolutely. And those check cashing services, those are concentrated in low to moderate income neighborhoods which are the most vulnerable populations and those ones that are most exploited.

Yeah, very interesting. Well, tell us about the debt cleanse thesis, if you will. You know, let's hear about some of the problems and solutions.

Sure. So the thesis is that if you cannot afford your debts, the best thing you can do is to stop paying them and stop paying all of them. And in doing so and settling that, setting that money aside, you can do a couple things. One, you can settle those debts as it becomes favorable to do so. And I'm talking about settling them in lump sums, discounted lump sum settlements, or achieving some kind of modification or workout on maybe a mortgage or some of the larger debt sizes. But the key is to stop paying. You will not get a great deal of a resolution until you stop paying. And that's unfortunate, but it's true.

Well, it's really interesting. And by the way, I just want to. You shared this when you were on my show before, but we didn't share it in this interview. The listeners should know that you are not some kind of consumer yourself that got into to a bad auto loan or a payday loan. You used to own 4,000 units. You were a big real estate investor and you had an 1100 unit apartment complex and 2,900 other units as well. So you have dealt with debt on a major scale, haven't you?

Absolutely. And it was always my friend, up until an ice storm devastated that 1100 unit complex. And another tidbit that you learn is, hey, if there's a big insurance claim, the insurance carriers often their strategy is to not pay it, deny it Force you to litigate and drag it out as long as possible until you're financially exhausted and you come to some kind of settlement. Kind of sounds like we propose to do to creditors, but that's what happened there. The insurance company denied the claim, we had to litigate. And meanwhile I had this property that was absolutely devastated by the ice storm. And it triggered this extraordinary sequence of events in which I lost everything and ended up $26 million in debt.

$26 million in debt. Wow, that's just mind boggling. Mind boggling. Okay, so back to the thesis of debt cleanse. How do you know what debt to pay and what debt not to pay? There's a question for you.

I don't think it's a question of choosing between which to pay. It's a question of what your current financial situation enables you to pay. And certainly if you can afford to pay all your debts, you should pay them. But if you can't pay them all, and you realize that if you total what you're bringing in each month and total what's going out each month, make a realistic assessment and today don't say, hey, well, maybe next week I'm going to win the lottery, I'm going to get discovered on Shark Tank or something like that. Say no promotions, no nothing. This is what I'm dealing with today. Is it realistic that I'm going to be able to continue to make those payments? And if it is, you should pay. But if it isn't, it's better to proactively stop paying those debts than to continue to pay some. This is what I started out doing. I paid some and then the next month I paid some, trying to keep everyone at bay. And in the end I was just absolutely financially exhausted and at my most, my weakest moment. And then I just, I mean financially, I collapsed.

So $26 million in debt, you ultimately stopped paying. Now, did you follow the plan you're outlining? I mean, because you had to learn as you go, you didn't have, have debt cleanse, right? You didn't have a system. I mean, I'm guessing you kind of developed the system as you go or tell us what you did and what happened and what people should do.

Absolutely. This was system was developed with my back against the wall and I was, you know, what do I do now? The good news and what I share in the book is that creditors often make mistakes. And when you can find those mistakes, you can exploit them. And I'll give you the one that really kind of turned the corner for me, one of my creditors made a mistake, and it was a fairly modest one, but I took him to court, and I won. They appealed it. It went to the Missouri Court of Appeals, which ruled that the creditor had inadvertently extinguished the $5.6 million debt and so I didn't have to pay. Now, that was a huge win. And right away I thought, wait, well, this creditor made this error on this huge mortgage. What about my other creditors? And I went out, pulled out all the paperwork, the collection calls, the legal pleadings, everything I had, every record that I had, I reviewed it to find the errors. And whenever I could find an error, I was able to use that as leverage and settle into debt at a big discount. There's one case. The error was so egregious that we went to court, and not only did I win in terms of I didn't have to pay the debt, but I actually got a judgment against the creditor.

Wow. Tell us about that one. How much and why did you get a judgment against them? Was it because. Did the court award you that because they were doing really bad, predatory things or what?

Really? The lender, I think, just gave up because they thought, this is too exhausting to battle this guy, and they awarded me my legal fees. So it wasn't like a huge victory, but they paid my legal.

Okay, good. I mean, let's dive into the system. Like, what do people do? Okay, stop paying. We heard that. Then what?

Then collect all the documents that you have from when you took out the loan, from any billing notices, any collection notices, any legal pleadings, anything like that. You want to gather them together. And we've created this website lately, so just recently launched last week, where people can upload all those documents to the website when they get a call from a creditor. They could log the call. The goal is to aggregate all this data and documents so that when you do get into trouble or when you get into litigation, you and an attorney can review and try to find those errors like I found.

Okay.

And having it all in one place makes it a lot easier than having, hey, where's that document? You know, attachment to an email or in a box or wherever it is.

Okay, so what kinds of things are you looking for? I mean, okay, so gather your documents. Be organized. I mean, what are you looking for in those documents? What kind of mistakes might a lender make or, you know, wrongdoings might you catch them on?

Sure. All kinds of stuff. To be clear, these errors aren't by necessarily just small lenders and collection agencies. These are, sometimes these errors can be made by the biggest banks in the country. For example, if you're in foreclosure, many a times whoever foreclosing may not have all the assignments or the launches which transfer the note. They may not have all those and they may not have had those when they started the foreclosure. As a result, they may lack standing. And this happens all the time. But most of the times the debtors don't contest the foreclosures and it just, the paperwork, it just goes through even though it's missing. But if you challenge it because you found these errors, everything stops. Many a times it's like, think about this, you know, these collection agencies, their attorneys and those for the mortgage companies, all these loans kind of go down a conveyor belt. Now once you're the one that answers and finds errors, your debt falls off the conveyor belt. And now, you know, the creditor or their attorney. Now somebody has to kind of figure out, well, how do we get this moving forward? And many a times it's easier for them just to say, what do you guys want? And we owe you $100,000. Where you know, we want to settle it for 10,000 if it's unsecured or something like that. Those things happen all the time.

So I mean we've all heard of these, well, maybe not everybody, but these incredible workouts. And interestingly, it can be profitable for the lender too, you know, or the buyer of that, that note. Like there will be these non performing notes, they'll go to the lender and buy them as your hedge fund does and then, you know, settle them for pennies on the dollar. And oddly, you know, everybody can kind of win out of that situation. You wouldn't think so you would think someone's taking a huge hit, but not, not always, right?

Yeah, the hits lots of times already been taken by the initial lender or some lender down the line, not the debt buyer that you're settling with.

And the reality is the hit was really taken by the TARP program, the taxpayers or a private mortgage, insurance company or some, you know, it's such a web. It's so complicated. It's just not simple, is it?

No, absolutely. There's all kinds of, of people, entities that can absorb these hits. And it's a cost of doing business. And I think the reality is one could step back and say, well, why aren't the banks or the collection agencies, why aren't they more diligent with their compliance and keeping their documents together and the reality is, I think they just consider it a cost of doing business and the vast majority of people did not fight back. And as a result, it's cost effective to leave it as is. Hopefully we can help change that. And ultimately maybe the practice of, of marketing, of collecting debt can be improved because it's really, if you get in trouble, if anyone who's ever been in trouble with their debts, they'll see all kinds of stuff happens. And many a times it's questionable the practices that are followed.

Yeah, no, it definitely is. And then you get to the part about debt collectors and boy, what a sleazy industry that is. I mean, they have laws and they just regularly disregard them, don't they?

Absolutely. It's amazing. I mean, we had one of our first clients at Declan's was a business here in Chicago that was, had fallen prey to these merchant cash advances, which if you're not familiar with them, it's kind of like a payday loan to a business. And they're horrific. The annual return on this was 80%. So this business, but it was disguised. And you look through the documents, it looked like they were paying 5%. Really, they were paying 80%. And, and we went to court, it was clearly it was fraud. And we went, the attorney that we connected the business with in New York, they ended up getting a temporary restraining order against the creditor. But it's something where they did everything. They added different companies names to the litigation. The business had not signed some documents and they were attesting the fact that everything was signed. It's either just very sloppy, which is probably their fallback position as this gets uncovered, or it just clearly looks like fraud and they think that they can do anything they want because most of these businesses are not fighting back.

Yeah. Wow. It's, it's really something else. Share with our listeners some other tips or, you know, just anything they should know about this topic. I mean, it's, it's a, it's a big topic, obviously. But, you know, before you do that, I just want to say one more thing. There is a really interesting case and I profiled it on my show many years ago when I was talking about the topic of fractional reservations reserve banking, otherwise known as fractional reserve lending. It's kind of all the same thing. I believe it was in the 60s where somebody was in foreclosure and they actually took it to court as the lender tried to foreclose on the property. And they said one of the points of the case was look, prove to me that you really lent me this money. And that was meant in a much more esoteric way because in order to lend the money, you have to actually have it first. And, and it's just an interesting thing about. We could get deep in the weeds on. On the way the Federal Reserve works and the monetary system works, but they couldn't prove it because the money was literally created out of thin air. And when you talk about thinking that the lender is going to actually lose money on the deal, the way our system works is so insanely weird. And again, you know, I've gone into this subject deep in the weeds on many prior episodes and interviewed many, many experts about it. But it really is just a fascinating, fascinating topic about how the whole system is built on debt. And the debt, you could really call it fake debt. You know, everybody talks about fake news. Well, the debt is fake. It's crazy.

It is. It really is. And it's funny and it's not new. This has been going on for generations. You mentioned the.

Well, the Federal Reserve came about over 100 years ago and there were other central banks before that. You know.

Absolutely.

We go back to the Rothschild family and the way the whole system works.

Around the world, the elite often find a way to ensnare or even enslave the majority of the population. And the way they do that is with debt. And actually, I remember the book the 5000 year, the book that you mentioned at the outset. One of the things they. I actually used that a little bit as research when I was writing my book. They had mentioned that in ancient Rome, I believe, there was something called nexum, where you could pledge yourself as collateral for a debt. And, you know, if you needed more collateral, you could pledge a son. And they were. It was just extraordinary. And one of the things that was discovered by the elite in Rome was that if you give people debt and the hope that they can eventually pay it off and reach a better place, a better life, then they're going to work harder than someone who's a slave who realizes that things are not going to get better or not going to improve. And I thought that was telling. It's unfortunate. If you look at it, you'll see that many countries, this is maybe even all the system is really stacked against the majority of the population. We'll call it the 99%, even though I probably say it's more like the 90% or 88% or something like that. But the statistics are horrific. You know, when I wrote the book, I included a statistic that 76% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. That statistic has gotten worse, not better. Currently it's 78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. So you see these widening wealth gaps, widening income gaps, and a lot of that is due to debt.

Let's wrap up with sharing some actionable tips for people.

Sure. Never feel that you don't have the same rights as a creditor. In all cases, debtors have the same rights as a creditor. Just because you borrowed the money doesn't mean that you have no defense. And I think that's a lot of people think, well, how can I fight it? I did get the money. I mean, I got my 26 million. It was in different loans and mortgages on properties. But I did borrow the money. I never contested that. So look for those. And then there'll be little issues like a missing notary seal, inconsistent dates, any of these things even. I'll give you a real quick In Georgia, there was recently a situation where Georgia changed their laws slightly and I believe they required an additional witness on a mortgage. And one of the law firms that does a lot of preparation of loan documents didn't update their system. So hundreds or if not thousands of loans were generated that had this small error where they were missing a witness. And I know the lender recently filed title claims on over 500 of these loans because when people were running into trouble, some of them were going to court getting these loans canceled and turned into unsecured debt. So these sound like extraordinary, but these things, there can be some extraordinary results for those that are struggling with their debts.

Yeah. Yeah. Good stuff. Okay. Give out your website, George.

It's debtcleans. Cleanse.com again. D E B T Cleanse C L E a n s e.com George Newberry.

Thanks for joining us.

I appreciate it, Jason.

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