Have you made the mistake of letting your credit card balances build up to the point where you’ve become a slave to your debt? In the bad old days slaves were owned by masters who worked them unmercifully. Today, you can be a slave owned by your credit card providers and working unmercifully just to keep making your minimum monthly payments.
Five options
There are actually five options for consolidating credit card debts. First, you could borrow money (a debt consolidation loan) and second you could go through consumer credit counseling. Third, there is professional debt consolidation and fourth, you could consolidate all the balances on your high interest credit cards onto a new one with a lower interest rate. And fifth, you could do debt settlement.
The pluses and minuses
Unfortunately, each of these options has both pluses and minuses. The biggest plus of a debt consolidation loan is that it will get all your credit card providers off your back and turn multiple monthly payments into just one, which will be lower than the total amount you’re now paying monthly. The minus of one of these loans is that it could take you as long as seven years to pay it off – and you will end up paying more in interest than if you had simply paid off your credit card debts.
Consumer credit counseling
Many families have found debt relief through consumer credit counseling, which is where you find a nonprofit agency that does credit counseling and let it help you develop a debt management plan (DMP). The agency will work with your credit card providers to get your interest rates lowered and for them to accept your plan. Once they do, you will longer have to pay them. Instead, you’ll pay the credit-counseling agency and it will pay your creditors per your debt management plan. This, too, has a downside – it will take you probably five years to complete your plan, you’ll have to give up all of your credit cards and it will leave a mark on your credit report, though not as severe a strain as if you filed for bankruptcy.
Balance transfers
Many of the credit card networks are now offering 0% interest balance transfer credit cards. Here, you would transfer the balances on all your credit cards to a new one where you would pay no interest for 6 to 18 months.. In other words, all the payments you make during that period of time would go against reducing your balance so that you should be able to get out of debt faster. The minus or negative of a balance transfer is that you shouldn’t take on any new revolving credit until you have paid off your new consolidated balance, and this will do nothing to reduce the amount of money you owe.
Debt settlement
If you have nerves like a lion tamer, you could try for debt settlement. To do this you would have to stop making payments on your credit cards for at least six months. Then you contact each of your credit card providers and offer to make an instant cash settlement but for maybe 50% of what you owe. If you can convince your credit card companies that they either settle or you’ll file for bankruptcy, they will probably accept your offers. Of course, and here comes the downside, you’ll have to have the cash in hand to pay the settlements.
Professional debt consolidation
We offer the fifth option, professional debt consolidation that could likely save you thousands of dollars and get you out of debt in 24 to 48 months. Our debt consolidation providers even offer a 100% satisfaction guarantee. If you’re not satisfied with the debt consolidation plans you’re offered, you can cancel and walk away without paying any fees or penalties. If you would like to become debt free in a reasonable amount of time and without exposing your finances to public records, call us today and let us explain how we do credit card consolidation right.