What Can Debt Counseling Do For Me?
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Financing |
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Credit / Debt Help |
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Our Website |
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What can debt counseling do for me? That’s a great question!
Most people really don’t know what debt counseling (also called credit counseling or credit consolidation) is all about. The best illustration I can provide is this story:
A good friend of mine, Tom, knowing that we had a website for people with bad credit, called and told me that he had made some bad investments and wanted my help. Now, I’m no investment counselor or stockbroker, I’m a writer, so at first glance I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to help him.
The obvious question was what kind of help was he looking for? He wasn’t exactly sure, but after some probing I found that he was looking for a genie in a bottle. You know, someone who by blinking, twitching their nose or some other unexplained trick could make his problems disappear. I’m afraid that is the stuff of the movies, not real life.
It seems that he had decided to start a business with a friend and had maxed his credit cards out to come up with the capital needed to get it going. Nobody could have predicted THIS economy and needless to say the business took too long to start making a profit and now his credit was a mess, he was late every month on credit card payments and the interest rates were so high he couldn’t make the minimums.
Once I realized the problem was overwhelming credit card debt and high interest rates I knew I could help him. Whew! I was sure he was going to ask me for investment advice or a personal loan!
I recommended that he talk to a debt counseling service from our site to get the payments to a manageable size. These people are Pro’s!
“What about the negative impact on my credit?” he asked?
My response? “Your credit is already damaged since you maxed your credit cards and made several late payments. And it’s getting worse every month that you can’t meet the minimum payments. A non profit debt consolidation company will negotiate with the creditors to get those payments down. After you start making them ON TIME your credit score will rebound.”
The nice thing about credit consolidation companies is that they actually work with the creditors on a debt reduction program. What that means is the creditors agree to a fixed, less amount. You’re given one payment, submitted to the debt counseling service, who then send it to all the creditors for you!
I explained to him that debt counseling agencies are non profit debt consolidation organizations whose only interest was in helping the client, not damaging them further, and that he contact one of them ASAP before his credit got any worse. Which he promptly did!
If you are in the same boat as my friend Tom may I suggest the same thing to you? What have you got to lose by working with a debt counseling professional who can negotiate a fixed payoff of those high interest credit cards you’re struggling with every month? In two or three years you can be debt free! The sooner you get started the better!
