Debt Consolidation Services

In my experience, these are death to your credit rating. Why?



Because of how they work. The short story is they get your creditors to agree to accept some lesser number of dollars for your debts. The creditors, for their part, aren't happy about this. They often mark you as not having paid in full. But that's not the really painful thing.



Since you're not paying the service very much, what usually happens is that they sit on your money for as long as they can before passing it on to your creditors. Thirty, sixty, even ninety days, to earn all of the interest they can.



But your creditors want that payment every month on time. So of course they are marking you thirty days late, sixty days late, or even ninety days late. Every creditor, every account. Every single one that's late lowers you credit score. It's unusual for folks who go through this to have credit scores over 500, and the worst score I've ever actually seen was the result of a debt consolidation "service" promising to "help" them. To paraphrase Arthur Dent, these must be new definitions of those words "service" and "help" with which I was previously unacquainted.



(Unethical Chapter 13 bankruptcy trustees can do the same thing, which is one reason why Chapter 13 is usually worse on your credit than Chapter 7, a severe flaw in the bankruptcy reform law being that it forces folks to hurt themselves worse when they are already in a bad situation. I've seen people one day out of Chapter 7 with 650 scores, and 580 is pretty common. 650 would be possible A paper if you're full documentation and didn't have more than a couple late payments. 580 is eminently improvable to something that looks decent in a hurry. The score coming out of Chapter 13 is usually something under 500)



Furthermore, debt consolidation services don't do anything that you cannot do yourself. Call the company and tell them the situation. They will terminate any open line of credit and remove the privilege of new purchases from your account, but they'll do that as soon as contacted by debt consolidation services, anyway. Furthermore, if you're in a hole the first step to fixing the situation is to STOP DIGGING!



When you call, have a good idea how much you can really pay per month. If you need to do this with multiple creditors, keep in mind that whatever you've got to pay with is going to have to be parceled out amongst all of your creditors, and don't allow yourself to be talked into more than the proportional amount. If you run into a lot of problems with negotiation, go to a legal aid center. Bankruptcies are a large portion of what they deal with. Explain that you have tried to work out a payment plan but that creditors X and Y are not being reasonable. It may be that bankruptcy is the way to go, but that's between you and a lawyer to decide.



Furthermore, whatever you do, keep at least one or two accounts in good standing if you possibly can. Keep one or two credit lines outside the payment plan or bankruptcy, and pay the payments in full and on time every month. Once you come out of the payment plan or bankruptcy, you're going to wish you had. You see, percentage of trade lines you include is one thing that will help determine your credit score later. If you included everything, you've hit your credit report as hard as possible. If you don't have any credit lines, you have to have new ones to start building new credit, and every time you make an inquiry after bankruptcy, the hit is much harder on your score than an inquiry from someone who hasn't been bankrupt. Finally, if you don't have any post-situation record of payments, it's never going to get better. The poor schmoe who includes everything he owes is pretty much hosed for a long time. My understanding is that a credit line where you owe $75 counts for this every bit as heavily as one where you owe $75,000, but it would be wise to double check that as it may be incorrect.



Caveat Emptor