debt advice

The actor Wesley Snipes is reportedly facing a lawsuit from the credit card company American Express over claims that he racked up $30,000 in credit card debt and failed to pay it off.

Snipes, 49, is currently serving a prison sentence over his debt problems with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), which pursued the Blade Runner star over millions of pounds in unpaid taxes.
Lawyers working for the actor employed a number of tactics to keep him out of prison, including the invocation of something called the “861 argument”. This theorises that some parts of US residents’ domestic income isn’t taxable, and Snipes claimed he was a “non-resident alien”.

This and other attempts failed, however, and in December 2010, Snipes was handed a three-year jail sentence for tax evasion and other related fraud charges. He is currently serving his sentence in the McKean Federal Correction Institution in Pennsylvania.

It now looks as if Snipes’ debt management problems will continue once he comes out of prison in 2013, or possible before his release, as American Express has filed a lawsuit against him over an alleged $29,343 credit card bill which he has yet to pay. The company is not only seeking to recover the amount Snipes ran up before entering prison, but also the interest on the debt and the legal costs it has incurred in taking the case to court.

Legal representatives for Snipes have not yet commented on the lawsuit.

A woman from York has spoken to a local newspaper about the moment she and her husband finally decided to seek debt management companies for advice when family’s debt problems reached £25,000.

Tess Sharratt, 30 from Acomb, spoke to the York Press about how debt problems began to take over her life after the family got into financial difficulties. Her husband Steve lost his job, and she had to leave her position when she became pregnant.

As the family’s debt management problems increased, Tess and her husband were hounded by creditors for repayment and debt collectors even started to contact their neighbours for information. They would be left with no money at all if they met all demands from creditors, so they only made minimum repayments.

Tess said she despaired of what to do, until the moment she finally decided to seek professional debt advice to get the family out of debt and back to normal. Bankruptcy was deemed to be the most suitable option, although Tess and husband Steve have had to work very hard to clear £5,000 from their existing debt problems.

Describing her stressful experience and explaining what it had taught her, Tess told the York Press:

“You should only spend what you can afford and if your children can’t get their computer games for Christmas that’s probably a good lesson for them to learn. It’s a lot worse to get into debt. That said, I was not lavishly spending money on credit cards. I didn’t get into debt by buying TVs and cars. For a long time, I kept chipping at the minimum payments. It was a very desperate situation and affected my health and everything really.”