Story by Kourtney Hannaway & Natalie Horner

Photos by Blake Hamilton

Julie Wisely works eleven hours a day managing the entire Northwest in a career dealing with debt and stress. She says it’s the most rewarding job she’s ever known.
Wisely is a debt counselor for Debt Reduction Services (DRS), a non-profit debt management company with headquarters in Boise, Idaho, and a local office in Eugene, Oregon. Wisely has a poised face, carefully made up. She listens intensely. There is a calmness about her despite a loaded schedule and the hassle of interviewers. No doubt this calm comes from her experience and the satisfaction she gets from her work.
Her office is spacious, on the second floor of an Executive Parkway office complex. It has big windows on two sides, overlooking the freeway traffic jams at night. She speaks directly and concisely, the kind of speech learned from five years of putting people back on track as a debt counselor.
“Back when I first started, one of my very first clients had $800 to live off of, total,” Wisely says. “She made sacrifices.” The woman got rid of her car to save money, and through that change ended up losing 150 pounds walking everywhere.
“She made a radical lifestyle change and built up her bank account while she was paying off $26,000 in debt. She just recently completed the program,” says Wisely as she leans back a little in her chair, remembering the experience. “She’s my hero.”
When she started working for DRS five years ago, Wisely had plenty of experience handling money; she managed a six million dollar account and owned her own business. Now she works as the regional manager for DRS in the Northwest. DRS is a state-regulated organization that works directly with clients providing budget and credit counseling, debt management programs, and community educational programs. They operate ten branch offices in seven states, providing services to clients throughout the United States.
“We get interest rates down, put them in a program for sixty months, max, and save them thousands,” Wisely says.
DRS receives funding from educational grants, and has a limit of fifty dollars for a consultation. Wisely says the average cost to a client is twenty-four dollars.
Because the company is a non-profit, there is no one that they turn away without helping.
“Some companies sign their clients up but don’t do the consulting. Our clients know us, they come in and work with us,” Wisely says.
Each client becomes memorable through working with them, she adds. However, as Wisely makes clear: “My job as a counselor is to stay grounded. That’s not to say the stories don’t deeply touch me, but I have to stay grounded.” Getting too emotionally involved could ultimately end up hurting the counseling process. Wisely says remaining detached is just a part of the job description.
Finding the right way to help people isn’t always easy. Wisely gives her clients tools to improve their financial situations, but ultimately they have to choose to put that advice into action.
“People don’t like to be told what to do. I can’t make payments for them. I can’t go home to remind them to live on a budget,” she says. “I help them do the things they don’t know how to do.”
With ten percent unemployment in today’s economy, such help is even more crucial. Wisely says she has definitely seen an increase in business in the past few years due to the struggling economy and lack of money management education.
“We all overextended when things were good,” she says. “Essentially we were spending in advance, because that’s what using a credit card is, only with penalties and fees.” The main pattern that she’s seen in her clients is a tendency to overspend. Wisely says it doesn’t matter how much someone makes – people who are in debt simply spend more than they make. “It’s not how much you make, it’s how much you save,” she says.
But advice like this is surprisingly lacking. Wisely says her generation didn’t have any early education in money management. Many older people didn’t discuss money matters with their children because “it was none of their business.” But that needs to change, Wisely says, and parents need to teach their children how to make smart choices.
“When we have clients come in we ask them: are you talking to your kids about this? They need early education to learn credit cards aren’t free money, to live inside your means, which means making choices. The bottom line is, you just have to spend less than you keep.” She smiles, “It seems simple, but a lot of people struggle with this concept.”
Wisely could very easily become bogged down by the constant troubles she sees, but instead she seems content, if not enthusiastic about her work and life in general. Perhaps this is because nearly all of her interactions with clients are positive in some way. The thing that makes DRS different, Wisely says, is they really get to know their clients.
“We help everyone, and each person’s situation is unique, so we give them a personal solution,” she says. “All of them become memorable, all are personal. We know them all very well.”
Wisely prefers the way her company responds to clients’ needs, so much that she says, “There’s nothing hard about this job,” mentally searching. “The long hours are challenging, but this is the most rewarding job I’ve ever had.”

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