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Now, he's back to pump up the effort, which deflated over the past four years.
"The credit situation in Memphis is dreadful," said Dempsey, 73, director of the Memphis Consumer Credit Education Association, a four-year-old foundation set up by and separate from the credit bureau.
"We're trying to get geared up to address that in greater capacity than ever before," he said.
The association will still do credit and budget counseling, the bread-and-butter of the consumer service that the credit bureau started in 1992.
But Dempsey and two counselors plan to jump headlong into the middle of the mortgage morass -- the association won approval from the U.S.
Department of Housing and Urban Development to do housing counseling and expects to get similar endorsement from the Tennessee Housing Development Agency.
"A big part of our (credit reporting agency) business is mortgages," Dempsey said of the credit bureau, which is owned by area merchants, although it sold its consumer database to Equifax in 2004.
"We're concerned about people who get into mortgages without really knowing what they did," he said.
A growing number of lenders are requiring prospective borrowers to get at least eight hours of counseling before they get a mortgage, Dempsey said.
So the association will set up one-on-one sessions and classes to help people meet that standard. It will offer half-day sessions during the week and on the second and fourth Saturdays of each month, Dempsey said.
The teaching won't just be about the ins and outs of mortgages.
"At the end, you've got to figure out how to keep the house," Dempsey said.
That not only means budgeting to make payments, but also learning where to go for help if you get in trouble, he said.
In addition, counselors hope to do loan mitigation -- helping people facing foreclosure work out deals with their lenders.
For people who don't get loans, Dempsey hopes to build a "denial warehouse." That is, lenders who turn down people for mortgages refer them to the association. If counseling helps those people improve their credit standing, the agency will send them back to the lenders.
The programs couldn't come at a better time, said Beth Dixon, president of the RISE Foundation, a nonprofit agency that works with low-income residents on their finances.
"This would be a tremendous boost for the community to have another resource like this," Dixon said. "We know of housing counselors working 80 hours a week right now to catch up with the demand."
This may be the first year that home foreclosures in the Memphis area equal or top home sales, she said.
"Charles Dempsey is an exceptionally caring and compassionate person who has the information to go along with that," Dixon said.
Dempsey plans to apply to the U.S. Trustee's Office to get the association certified to do counseling required by law before people file bankruptcy petitions.
And, he will ramp up the credit and budget counseling. One- to 1-1/2-hour sessions will cost $20 each, starting with discussion of consumers' credit reports, building a plan, including timetables, to improve credit scores and reviewing progress.
"Among the three of us (Dempsey and two counselors), we have 100 years of experience," he said. "That should say a lot about what we can do."
To see more of The Commercial Appeal, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.commercialappeal.com. Copyright (c) 2008, The Commercial Appeal, Memphis, Tenn. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.
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