Your credit cards are maxed out. Your mortgage is spiraling out of control. you have fallen behind on your car payments. Then you see a commercial on television for a debt-consolidation company that promises to reduce your debt by 50% and they will fix your credit overnight. you call them, looking for more information and they proceed to tell you tales of woe and how they miraculously made all of the problems go away. you ask them why the advertisements require a minimum of $10,000 indebtedness and they tap dance around the subject. you ask about fees and the only answer you get is that you will have to pay a nominal monthly charge.
Basically, what a majority of such companies do is prey on emotionally-charged, vulnerable consumers desperate to get out of a difficult situation. what ends up happening is that they get you to sign a contract with them, then tell you that you will have to take out a loan to pay off all of your outstanding debt leaving only the one loan payment to repay. That is why so many companies only accept people with debt in excess of $10,000 as clients. the company either loans the money directly or through a tight network of lenders, usually at significant interest rates with plenty of junk fees thrown in to pad their bottom line.
The truth of the matter is that there is no magical solution to credit repair. even those companies which decide to report negative information about consumers such as delinquent payments and write-off do not do so overnight. the process of both reporting good and bad information to the credit bureaus takes time, so how can any one company profess to be able to get someone's credit report fixed faster than anyone else? the simple answer is that they cannot.
The key is learning discipline and to manage your money wisely. you can get started by ordering a credit report and getting erroneous information changed right off the bat. from there the only way to remove negative information and replace it with positive is to do the right things going forward: keeping usage ratios in check, paying bills timely, reducing the amount of new credit that is applied for, etc. only then will your credit report start to take a turn for the better.
As for managing your already existing debt burden, consolidating all of it into a single loan payment makes sense only if the new payment is at an interest rate that is lower than your current creditors is charging. and, if you are already far enough behind that negative information is being reported to the credit bureaus, then that is not likely to happen. you can get together with a debt counselor or financial advisor, who can analyze your current situation to come up with a plan that will focus on paying off the debt which is costing you the most interest first (which will effectively minimize your interest expenses going forward).
The most important thing to remember is that you should not have to spend significant amounts of money in escalating fees, or be locked into a contract with a company especially if they can in no way deliver on what they promise. take the time to do your research and inquire into their claims and practices. There are many companies which truly take an interest in helping individuals and work off of a fee-only concept and will actually continually to make themselves available even after the process has started to show results. I should know my company is one such company as we believe that sometimes helping others to help themselves is more important making a profit.
Be Careful When Choosing Debt Consolidation or Credit Counseling Options
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