Here is a great illustration of laziness or paralysis (or something) that I see all the time. One of our readers was being taken to court over a debt. The lawsuit was so poorly filed that he could have easily fought it and won without a lawyer. Despite voluminous advice given (and spoon-fed to him, I might add) on our Discussion Forums, he still wanted someone to do all the work for him. He kept saying, “but my court date is in X number of days, someone tell me what to do”. Hey, we did. But we aren’t going to look up your state’s specific laws to do some slight tweaking one of the numerous legal templates posted in our discussion boards. Furthermore, we aren’t going to type it out and send it to to you. You gotta at least try to do some of the research and work. This way, you can ask the right questions if you get stuck.

Some of the questions I get asked all the time clue me in as to why someone is in trouble in the first place. They come to creditinfocenter.com, call the phone number and ask “How do I fix my credit?” “Well”, we respond, “you could start by reading the information on the website”. I may be biased, but come on, all the information you need to know is all right there. You gotta at least make an effort. I’ll bet they are the same kind of people who ask questions like “If I move and I don’t get a credit card bill - do I still have to make a payment?” (The answer, in case you are wondering, is “yes”, and we get that one all the time.)

Curious what our first clueless reader would have had to do to win his case, I can sum up the problem and the cure in a few sentences. Basically, the law firm was suing him in Florida when he lived in New York. You can’t really do that - it causes a hardship for the person being sued to travel for court. And it’s against Florida court rules. All he would have to is file a motion to dismiss the case due to improper venue, which he was told. It’s basically a 5 liner document and he could have filed the motion via USPS Registered Mail or FedEx. We pointed him to templates he could use, and told him to Google the specific Florida rule number for the motion. Apparently, this was too much effort, and instead he is declaring bankruptcy. Crazy.

It took me about 1 minute to find the Florida Civil Code Number by entering in “improper venue Florida” in Google. Here’s the link: http://law.justia.com/florida/codes/TitleVI/ch0047.html

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