Learn why the majority of credit counseling programs fail!
This concise article will reveal to you some of the problems with consumer credit counseling programs. These are the issues that turn in a failure rate of over 80% of the clients enrolled in these programs. Debtors should be knowledgable of these facts before they get themselves into a consumer credit counseling program to guarantee themselves they are deciding on a good financial move.
1. Most of the online consumer credit counseling companies are made and funded by the actual credit card companies themselves. They are nothing more than a middle man for the credit card issuers to collect the debt amount owed.
2. The online consumer credit counseling companies work for and represent the credit card issuers; they do not work on behalf of the client. The credit card organizations stateto the credit counseling company the minimum payment requirement, and the interest rate. There is no negotiation at all on this.
3. The online consumer credit counseling organizations will reduce the APR, however they can never actually reduce the original balance. The common APR on one of these programs is around 10% which is more in the middle than actually being a low interest rate. By not reducing the original balance they aren't really a method of credit card debt relief, this is just an accelerated payment program.
4. You will wind up actually paying more than the principal debt amount, due to the monthly fees, APR and lowered monthly payments which greatly bumps up the amount of time you are going to be stuck in debt.
5. It can have a brief adverse impact on your credit rating and is made a public record on your credit history, during the time you are in the program.
6. Receiving a home loan while on a online consumer credit counseling program can become undeniably hard, on the edge of being impossible.
7. Here is the number one reason people fail and read very carefully. If you drop behind only one payment while on a consumer credit counseling program you will be booted out of the program and the creditors will not allow you to re-enroll into another program for a year. Which will put your bills right back to where they were before, high interest and all. This is the reason why upwards of 75% of the clients signed into these programs drop out.
Sit back and really think nice and hard about this for a minute. They place you into a consumer credit counseling program that may take 5 years or more. As we all know life has its good times and its bad times. If you find it extremely tight to be a client on the program in the first place you will fail off. Any random financial problems as big or small as they may be could contribute to you missing just one payment and getting kicked out of the program. You need to sincerely think about how secure your finances and income security are before getting into a online consumer credit counseling program to evade being part of that 80%. The bottom line is those with a larger amount of debt such as $10,000 or more should lean more towards credit card debt settlement than credit counseling. Credit counseling is much more viable for those with much lower sums of debt that do not have much of any problems keeping up with their bills in the first place. If you are looking to lower your debt and get out of debt very quickly, then credit counseling is just not for you.
Steve Bis is a debt analyst with the US Consumer Advocate, which practices debt relief.
Published December 7th, 2007