The Painful World

Credit counseling is often a difficult and painful subject to approach. Many people do not like to admit they need help with their finances and unfortunately many people allow too much time to pass before seeking such help. Even after the decision to seek help is made, however, it is important to choose the right firm to handle the rebuilding of your credit and your financial reputation.

The vast majority of credit counseling and debt reduction firms are honest and upstanding, but the existence of a few highly publicized bad apples has sullied the reputation of the industry. There are some classic warning signs that you are dealing with an untrustworthy credit counselor. Watching for those signs, and avoiding those firms, is the best way to get the credit counseling you need and avoid any potential problems.

Some signs of a poor quality credit counseling firm include things like:

* Promising too much. A firm that promises to eliminate all your debt, or promises that you can pay back only pennies on the dollar, is probably over promising and will be unable to deliver.

* Employing hard sell tactics. A credit counselor who insists that you sign paperwork on your first visit, before you have had time to shop around, is to be avoided. A good credit counselor will not be afraid to allow you time to shop the competition and make a wise decision.

* Giving you blank forms to sign. A credit counselor who gives you incomplete or even blank paperwork to sign is to be avoided. It is important to read all documents presented to you before signing any type of agreement.

* Not offering budgeting or personal finance classes. The best credit counseling services do more than get you out of your current financial mess. They actively assist you in avoiding such financial problems in the future. They do this by offering classes on such important subjects as making a budget, using credit wisely and protecting your credit score. Be sure to look for such classes when evaluating credit counseling and debt reduction firms.

It may not be easy to find the right credit counselor, but it is an important financial decision. Getting out of debt the right way is essential to your long term financial health, and a quality credit counseling service can help you do just that.

Find out more at http://sosdebt.org/

The most important first step you should take is to admit that you have a financial problem. As soon as you do that, you have taken a very big leap towards positive debt counseling and will soon recover from your debt problems. As they always say, the biggest obstacle to debt recovery or debt consolidation is denial. As long as you refuse to face up to your debts and financial problems, you’ll remain stuck in your predicament.

Debt counseling is a kind of service that you can make use of in order to understand your future financial plans and to plan ahead with adjusting your lifestyle and spending in order to recover from your financial crisis. Debt counseling is often advertised as non-profit, but let me tell you something, they are not always non-profit. But if the debt counseling service can help you leap over this financial problem, what’s paying a little bit of money to get professional advice, right?

Some people refuse to visit a debt counseling company because they fear that it will affect their credit rating, or make it even worse. The good news is that credit counseling companies rarely report your visits and reveal your personal financial information to the credit bureau. However, even if they do report your counseling service to the credit bureau, which is better – continue to sink into your financial debts or get professional debt counseling services so that you can avoid bankruptcy?

If you want to work on debt consolidation and restoring your financial health, we recommend using a debt counseling service because these are people who are trained to work at the numbers and provide you with alternatives. It’s far better than not using debt counseling and doing it yourself blindly – especially if you’re not sure how all this debt counseling and debt consolidation things work. Let the debt counseling people handle all the nitty gritty details for you. All you need to do is to ensure that you have a budget and use every single ounce of your willpower to resist overspending.

In most cases, there is no such thing as a better debt counseling agent and the worse debt counseling agent. They are, essentially, the same. The cost of using a debt counseling agent may, however, be different. However, the debt counseling agent will take about 6 months to work out your proposal and getting it accepted by all the creditors (depending on how many creditors you have and how much money you owe them). But the work of a debt counseling agent is to help the creditors see that this is the best that you can afford. If the creditors refuse the proposals, they may see NOTHING at all.

If you’re wondering if you can actually do this yourself, the answer is ‘yes’. But if you asked me, I would say that all this legwork is better left to the debt counseling professionals. As it is, budget watching and paying is already a big enough job.

Dakota Caudilla, journalist, and website builder Dakota Caudilla lives in Texas. He is the owner and co-editor of http://www.finance-source.net on which you will find a longer, more detailed version of this article.