Litigation

$3,500 wasted with United First Financial, per Dave Ramsey

By Tracy Coenen

I’ve had lots of comments on my thread here about United First Financial and Dave Ramsey. Dave is an absolute expert on credit issues, and he hates UFF. He says it’s a complete waste of money. (Of course, I agree.)

As usual, he’s accused of not knowing what he’s talking about because he hasn’t been to one of the UFF cult meetings. The fact is that he’s very savvy about this.

You waste $3,500 for a piece of software that claims to have magical powers in getting your mortgage paid off early. The truth is that any consumer can pay off their mortgage for free (assuming their mortgage allows pre-payment) and all they have to do is spend less than they make, and put their extra money toward their mortgage. You can save $20,000 on your mortgage, and I show you how here (and for free!).

A woman called into Dave Ramsey’s show to tell him how wrong he is about UFF. It’s so agonizing to listen to this woman spouting marketing scripts for the program, and sounding completely uneducated about mortgages. And she’s a UFF agent! She’s supposed to know what she’s talking about, but instead she proves my point that most of these agents are clueless. And she doesn’t even know that the company has a multi-level marketing structure!

Take a listen to this call at Dave Ramsey’s site.

He predicts the company will be out of business in two years, and all those people who paid $3,500 will be out of luck. (That’s because you don’t actually GET any software for your money. You just get access to the software on their servers.) I happen to think Dave is right. A lot of MLMs can carry on their schemes for years. But I don’t think this one will survive long.

UFF has such a huge one-time investment that I think many consumers will do research before buying. I can only hope this is the case, although someone I used to respect as an expert on credit matters supposedly did 2 weeks worth of research on UFF and thinks it’s fabulous. Duh! So anyone can be fooled by UFF.

However, if enough consumers take the time to fully research this and don’t fall for the marketing scripts and fluff pieces out there about United First Financial, I think the company will go away in two years or less. Selling consumers a one-time, $3,500 item, is going to be a difficult to do in the long run, especially with people like Dave Ramsey (and me!) helping to educate consumers and preventing them from wasting their money!

Full post as published by The FRAUDfiles Blog on July 10, 2008 (boomark / email).