Let me give you a few cautionary points before you hire any debt settlement/negotiation company for debt free relief.
If you search online for “debt settlement forums” or “debt negotiation forums”, you will get a sense of the buzz in the debt forum communities. I recommend that you do this before you hire a settlement/negotiation company. Join a few forums and ask questions. These are people who have signed up with debt settlement/negotiation companies and experienced the process.
What will you find out? There are strongly negative and positive comments about virtually every national debt settlement company. Also, more importantly, you may not be getting what you think you are getting.
(1) You may not be shielded from creditor harassment.
You may believe you are protected from harassing calls at home and at work after signing up with the settlement company, but many in the debt forums tell a different story. They tell of still being harassed AFTER signing up with a settlement company.
(2) The debt settlement/negotiation outfit can and very well might “string out” the payoff of your creditors.
You sign up with a settlement company and the payment you make to them is lower than the total of all the payments you were making. Wonderful, right? Even allowing for the fact that creditors may still be calling, you think you can hold on and make it out of this wilderness. Where is the rub?
Suppose a settlement company negotiates with a creditor and this company will accept 80% of what you owe on the account. Will they go ahead and pay it over time? Perhaps not. Why?
The longer the account goes unpaid, the lower the amount the creditor will accept in negotiation. If the debt settlement guys wait it out until the creditor would accept 60%, they could make more money. The difference between what they get from you and what they pay the creditors grows larger if they wait it out.
If they waited until the creditor would accept 40%, they would make even more money. Meanwhile, harassing calls can continue while the settlement company refuses to make payments to the creditor to string it out to make more money. This is the buzz in the debt forums on the internet about all settlement companies in general.
(3) The creditor or debt collector may send you a 1099 Form showing the amount your debt is reduced as income for which you will have to pay taxes.
The amount of the reduction of indebtedness can be viewed as a financial benefit that equals, in the eyes of the IRS, income received. If your debt is reduced by $10,000, this can be considered $10,000 of income. Sometimes I think the 1099 is given solely out of spite, but whether spite is involved or not, this is another issue to keep in mind and ask about.
(4) A creditor or debt collector can and sometimes does sue you AFTER you are signed up with a debt settlement/debt negotiation company.
The laws vary by state, but you often are not protected from a lawsuit simply because you are contractually signed up with a debt settlement company. Our friends in the debt forums tell horror stories that are quite edifying about this and other surprises they experience.
Keep all of these issues in mind and ask questions until you feel that you understand the settlement process. “In a multitude of counselors there is safety” according to the book of Proverbs. Do not sign up immediately when you first speak to a debt settlement/negotiation company. Talk to every sage soul you can, do serious research and think about this long and hard before you sign a contract for debt free relief by settlement.
There are no magic bullets that solve your debt problems instantaneously and send you skipping and jumping merrily along.
We want to avoid our problems, go “dark”, not answer the phone, hide out, then get someone to wave a magic legal wand to stop the misery. There is more to it than that and it pays to understand this when going into the process.
There is help available, but you have to do your own research, take responsibility and go into the debt negotiation process with your eyes open.
It is also possible to do debt settlement yourself with some of the resources available at the website indicated below. It requires boldness. You actually have to speak, and not timidly, to your creditors. If you are not willing to do that and you go the third party negotiator route, please just understand that you certainly can, but it may be a lot more difficult than you think it will be.
There is another alternative, bleak though it may be, and that is to just sit there, paralyzed by fear, doing nothing. You cannot really afford to do that, can you?
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