This Davie founder uses his debt relief website to pay it forward
Long before he opened his company’s headquarters in South Florida, Debt.com founder Howard Dvorkin grew up Jewish in a mostly Italian working-class neighborhood in Toms River, New Jersey. From a young age, he understood the value of hard work and fondly remembers selling Passover cookies to his Italian neighbors to raise money for his synagogue.
“Whatever the case was, we were always taught to be entrepreneurs,” said Dvorkin, 59.
Despite facing grief and financial challenges as a teen, Dvorkin’s passion for entrepreneurship was rekindled years later when he started a company promising debt relief for people who’d fallen behind on payments. That service eventually became Debt.com, a digital platform that provides users with financial advice.
After 30 years of that work, Dvorkin has now been named a recipient of the 2025 Horatio Alger Award, an award given to professionals who exhibit perseverance and integrity despite undergoing personal hardships. He will be honored alongside 11 others at a ceremony next month in Washington, D.C.
Dvorkin was 13 when his father, Paul, died abruptly of a heart attack. Dvorkin, who was home at the time, attempted CPR, but nothing could be done to help his father.
Losing his father had an adverse effect on Dvorkin. By his senior year of high school, he had started to hang with “the wrong crowd.” The sobering experience of getting arrested for vandalism and underage drinking put him on a different path.
“I was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he said. “We all got arrested, and I was chained to a pole in a police station in this backwater town. I got bailed out and looked at myself in the mirror the next morning and said that this is not the path I want to go down.”
Dvorkin refocused on academics and said he graduated in the top 10 of his high school class. He started his freshman year at West Virginia University but, after realizing it wasn’t the right fit, decided to transfer to American University in Washington, D.C.
After graduating from American in 1986, Dvorkin began work as an accountant. A friend still in school at the University of Miami invited him to Florida for a spring break trip. With an abundance of sun and fun, Dvorkin’s friend talked about the possibility of Dvorkin going to graduate school in South Florida.
Determined to attend business school at UM, Dvorkin cashed in the savings he had earned through stock investments and odd jobs while he was a student at American. After a year and a half, he earned his master’s degree in business administration from the University of Miami.
Working in finance for several years exposed Dvorkin to the financial challenges that many Americans face on a daily basis. In 1991, he saw a need to help people with financial problems and started to brainstorm what a business could look like.
“I sat down at my kitchen table, and I came up with the concept,” he said. “I saw that people needed a lot of help, but there were multimillions of dollars they owed.”
If a person wanted debt advice in the early ‘90s, they would have to drive to an expert who could be many miles — or even states — away. Dvorkin spoke with a friend who worked as a telemarketer about the possibility of helping people with financial problems via phone. Creditors that Dvorkin spoke to didn’t think it would work, but he took the risk anyway.
His new company, Consolidated Credit Services, launched in January 1993 with 12 employees and quickly gained traction. Customers called the company to speak with operators who gave financial advice. Counselors worked with creditors to set up a debt management plan, and customers paid a monthly fee for the plan’s management.
Dvorkin said he spoke with many people from Miami who were impacted by literal and financial damage from Hurricane Andrew in 1992.
“I still get calls from those same people that I helped 30 years ago,” he said.
By 1997, Consolidated Credit Services was helping people around the country better manage their finances. A recent college graduate, April Lewis, started working with the company and had a novel idea.
“I used a computer all the time in college,” she said. “When I came in, [Howard] asked what we could do to crack the market. I said ‘use the internet.’”
The same company that gained a foothold via telephone calls pivoted into Debt.com. At the time, employees printed out emails and went through stacks of them to respond with financial advice. The website hosted free financial tools to help people manage their debts, and the company received a referral fee in exchange for promoting third-party products and services.
The formula proved effective for running a business, and Dvorkin estimates that his company has helped millions of people to date.
In 2014, Debt.com opened its Davie headquarters, and it now has 700 employees nationwide. But for Dvorkin, business success will always come second to finding ways to help others.
“I love helping people,” he said. “I love seeing people grow. It started in call centers, and now [my first employees are] running rooms with 100 people under them. That’s what the Horatio Alger Award is about: giving people opportunity and living the American dream.”
Dvorkin has lived in Parkland for 30 years and has a special connection to the community. When the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting happened in 2018, Dvorkin started Parkland Cares, a nonprofit created to support the students affected and their families. The organization has since paid for 44,000 hours of mental health counseling for the students affected by the incident.
Being recognized by the Horatio Alger Association, which funds student scholarships, is important to Dvorkin because he understands the challenges students sometimes face when paying for college. When he attended last year’s Horatio Alger Association gala in Washington, D.C., he met some of the scholarship recipients and was inspired by the tenacity with which they excelled in spite of difficult circumstances.
“We all came from disadvantaged backgrounds and had everything thrown at us,” he said. “It’s [about] passing it forward.”
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