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Hello my name is Joe Sellers and I have been working with people that are in debt with their unsecured credit card debts for a while now and understand the effect it has on people’s lives. When you have credit card debt and believe that the situation is out of control, you would be smart to make a choice on what to do and make it quick. You should not put it off until it is too late. As many of you must already know is that the creditors are not co-operative when you contact them with problems with your bill. It’s pretty exciting the way it works because when you first obtain the card they are very polite people while you are speaking with them. Then if you call them to dispute a past due or over limit charge and try to have it reversed enough to try and maintain payments with 10% or even the 7.9 % interest that they are charging on your accounts. How are you supposed to pay for the higher payments now? It was horrible enough to manage before the interest was raised. This is the reason U.S. consumers are searching for other options such as Bankruptcy, or Debt Settlement vs. Credit Counseling. If you are not familiar with any of your options then I will offer you a little bit of an education on them.
Consumer Bankruptcy
Before 2005 bankruptcy was to be used for consumers who were having serious money hardships. Regrettably it was misused by thousands of consumers who were trying to evade paying their unsecured debts. They didn’t want to take responsibility for their misgivings. The credit card companies were sick and tired of this so they petitioned to have the legislation updated. It is now known as the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection act of 2005. It would make it harder for the majority of consumers to file for help. Bankruptcy should only be made use of as your very last choice after you have tried every alternative option. Also you should think of the negative aftereffects that very well might come back later on down the road. You would have to hire an attorney, go to court and that would run you a substantial amount of your hard earned income. There is also the matter of it being on your FICO report anywhere from 7 to 10 years. When you filling out any significant application or document you will always have to say yes when asked the question about bankruptcy, so this does have a extremely long lasting effect on your ability to obtain future credit.
Credit Counseling
Everywhere you look, either on TV or the radio, you will hear about credit counseling. A credit counseling agency will try to get the creditors to reduce the interest rate on your credit cards. You then make one monthly installment to the credit counseling agency and they then pay each one of your creditors on your behalf. The down fall to this method is even though they reduce your interest on your credit card balances you might still pay back as much as 125% of what you actually owe.
This is because with this sort of program you will still be paying back what the full original balance was plus some of the interest for around possibly five years or more. Almost 75% of the individuals that are in these programs don’t finish the program for one reason or another. Another downfall to credit counseling is that if you have a money problem and are miss your monthly payment they will boot you off of the program straight away. They will also raise your interest back up and the creditor could keep you off the program for a minimum of one year and sometimes even longer. This could put you right back to where you started from, if not in a worse situation.
This is the method where you can save the greatest amount of money. A good standing credit card debt settlement company will save you at least 40% of what you actually owe. The 40% should include all of their charges. Just as with credit counseling, you will hear a lot of TV and radio ads all the time. These companies are opening up all across our beloved country. Some of these companies try to make it appear like they have a magical bullet and are going to make all your debt vanish out of nowhere.
There are also some companies that try to use religion to attain the trust of debtors. Whichever company you intend on hiring it is your responsibility to do research on them. You should start with the BBB (Better Business bureau). You may be able to find out quite a bit about a company from them. If you find out that a company has only been in settling debts for a little while and has a lot of complaints against them, then you know to avoid them. One more thing to look for is how long has the company been in business. Some companies only last a couple of years before they go out of business or get caught ripping people off. Then some of them only stick around to make as much money as they can and close shop just to open up right next door under a new name.
Joe Sellers is a Credit Card Debt Relief analyst with the US Consumer Advocate, which practices in credit card debt reduction.
