Hello my name is Steve Bis and I have been helping consumers that are in arrears with their credit cards for a considerable amount of time and know the negative effects it has on someone’s life. When you have credit card debt and know that the situation is no longer something you can control, you should make a choice on what to do and make it fast. You don’t want to put it off until it is too late. As many of you bye now already know is that the creditors are not very easy to deal with when you speak to them with complaints with billing. It’s extremely fascinating the way it works because when you first get the card they are pretty nice people when you call. Then if you contact them to dispute a past due or over limit penalty fee and attempt to have it reversed enough trying to keep up with 10% or even the 7.9 % interest that they are charging on your credit cards. How are you suppose to cover the elevated payments now? It was bad enough to manage before the interest skyrocketed. This is why many U.S. citizens are seeking out other options such as credit card debt settlement vs. credit counseling, or bankruptcy. If you do not know much about these options then I will give you a little information on them.
Bankruptcy
Prior to 2005 bankruptcy was to be used for individuals who were fighting through serious money hardships. Regrettably it was abused by far too many consumers who were attempting to evade paying their unsecured debts. They didn’t want to take responsibility for their actions. The credit card industry was sick and tired of this so they lobbied to have the laws changed. It is now referred to as the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection act of 2005. It would make it much more of a task for many Americans to file for help. Bankruptcy should only be exercised as your very last choice after you have explored every other debt relief 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 a lawyer, go to court and that could run you a substantial amount of your hard earned income. There is also the issue of it being on your credit report for a long time. When you are signing any important 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 credit.
Credit counseling
In each direction you look, either it is advertised on the radio or television, you will hear about consumer credit counseling. A credit counseling company will attempt to get the creditors to reduce the interest on your credit cards. You then make one monthly installment to the consumer credit counseling company and they then pay each one of your creditors on your behalf. The fallback to this choice is even though they reduce your interest rate on your credit card balances you might still pay back as much as 120% of what you actually owe.
This is because joining this kind of agenda you will still be paying back what you owe plus some of the interest for around 4 to 7 years. Almost seventy five percent of the debtors that are in these programs don’t graduate from the program for missing as much as one payment. Another problem to credit counseling is that if you have a income problem and are miss your monthly payment they will kick you out of the program straight away. They will also increase your interest back up and the creditor could keep you off for around one year and on some occasions even longer. This will put you right back to where you began, if not in a worse situation.
Texas and Dallas Credit Card Debt Negotiation (also known as debt settlement)
This is the debt relief method which can save you the largest amount of money. A ethical credit card debt settlement company will save you at least 40% of what you currently owe. The 40% should cover all of their charges. Just like consumer credit counseling, you will hear a lot of TV and radio advertisements very frequently. These companies are starting up everywhere across our beloved country. Some of these companies try to make it appear like they have a magic wand and are going to make all your debt disappear out of nowhere.
There are also some companies that try to use religion to gain the trust of debtors. No matter what company you are going with it is your responsibility to do research on them. You should start with the BBB (Better Business bureau). You will be able to discover quite a bit about a company from the Better Business Bureau. If you see that a company has only been in business for a little while and has a slew of complaints against them, then you must stay away. Another thing to look for is how much time has the company been in business. Some companies only survive one or two years before they get shut down or get caught with their hands in the cookie jar. Then some of them only stay around to make as much money as they can and close down just to open up down the streetunder a new company name.