credit consolidation advice please!!
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| Mon, 12-13-2004 - 11:20am |
Hi everybody,
I have been kinda surfing in and out of this message board for a little while now. I need some advise....
My husband and I have gotten ourselves into some debt (credit cards, hospital bills, etc) and were were thinking about perhaps consolidating our debt through a credit counsel organization. I would like to know if anyone knows of a particular one that is the "best", one that wouldn't totally mess up our credit ( if we went to maybe obtain a loan to buy a house within the next few years), and one that has a good reputation, etc. I am not really up on all of the information needed to know in order to find a good company to combine our bills to get them paid off...but I am hoping with some advice from you guys (people that would know firsthand) we will be able to accomplish this.
Thank you in advance!!
Erin :)

I think to not hurt your credit you would want to get a consolidation loan through a bank. But you do need good credit to do this. I thought that credit counseling services collected your money from you, deducted a fee for them, and then negotiated lower interest and thus lower payments on all your cards in order to pay them down. I have also read on here about debt management companies that let your debts charge off and then negotiate settlements, which would destroy your credit for many years.
What is the problem you need to address? Are your interest rates too high? Do you have too many cards and can only pay the minimums? A consolidation loan is only going to help if you can get a lower interest rate, and sometimes when you are in too much debt that is hard to do. Otherwise having a systematic method to paying each card off one at a time would work best, and you don't need to pay anyone a fee to do that for you.