Remembering Mom: If Her Services Had Been About Her

Mom was entombed yesterday. Her service was a lovely sermon that she would likely have despised. It isn't that the minister wasn't eloquent. It was that he talked too much about religion and got too many things about her incorrect.

To be fair, the job of speaking at her service was offered to me before the minister was hired. I declined. I had the experience speaking at Dad's service. Besides not having practiced public speaking for almost two decades, Mom never asked me to do her service. Dad did. There were points during his service that, if I had broken down, I probably could not have recovered. I was practiced in those days. To that end, it is as much my fault as anyone else's that Mom's services turned into a sermon like at a church service.

Marketing Bankruptcy (Newsletter: Issue 295 in May 2000)

In the '80s, we began recommending non-obligatory agreements with full disclosure as the way to recover unsecured money in bankruptcy. Hardly anyone listened. Within a few years Voluntary Repayment Agreements (VRAs) started being used. By this time, we were recommending that members who were no significant collection problems be offered retention of their lines of credit in exchange for VRAs. Hardly anyone listened. To date, our Bankruptcy Program clients have recovered hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of dollars using this strategy.