CCCS - is it even a possibility for us?

[NiteNicole]

I posted here a long time ago when I found out that we not only had significantly less money than I thought, but a large amount of credit card debt. Some of it is due to careless spending (my husband is generous and can not say no, I always assume that he's on top of things), some of it due to work travel expenses and some of it due to a LOT of medical bills that piled up starting about nine months ago. A few times we put medical expenses on our credit cards when we should've made payment arrangements with the hospitals/dr offices. I didn't know that was even a possibility till I read that here. Stupid.

ANYWAY, we are butt loads in debt (three credit cards, two small and one BIG), student loans, and now a few hospital bills. We also have a piece of property we're trying to sell, and we've decided we can no longer afford our house so we're trying to sell it as well. We are not behind on anything and we are just making our bills, but I am wondering if we could roll all of our credit cards, hospital bills, and student loans together through something like CCCS? Would ANY credit cards be willing to reduce our rates while we are still making our payments? Would it be a massive ding on our credit? I am pretty sure that if we can sell this house we will rent and for that we need clean credit.

We're in such a tiny town right now, I can't even get a job. We have one car. We're on top of our gas and groceries as much as possible. We really need to do SOMETHING that gives us a little gap between just making our bills and being able to save.

We went from doing JUST FINE to OH CRAP in the span of a few months. It's scary.

[NiteNicole]

Ok, that's a lot of words to ask two fairly simple questions (and after reading, maybe they're getting lost in all my blah blah blah):

If we're making our payments on time, will credit cards even consider lowering our rates?

If we go with Consumer Credit Counseling Services (which I remember some of my friends using in college) is it a big ding on our credit?

[sinsaratea]

i'm pretty sure cccs will only deal with stuff on credit cards. ask them, but i think that's all they do. i've been on cccs for a large amt [@23K-paid off] and currently with a smaller one [@1K].

as far as student loans, have you already consolidated them? look into the income based repayment plan... i have 50K in student loans and pay 180/mo with the IBR.

[happysmileylady]

I am pretty sure that most credit counseling services deal primarily with credit card debt. Some might deal with medical debt, but I think that's not the norm. And I am pretty sure that most will not deal with student loans-they are already low interest, really easy to put into hardship deferral, and they stick around through everything, you can't even bankrupt them. But, I am not an expert in them, so it wouldn't hurt to call around and check, they aren't going to pull your credit report unless you ok it.

As far as being a ding on your credit, they can be. I worked with a company called InCharge a few years ago. With them, there is no account to show up on your report. They don't do any reporting to the credit agencies. But, after contacting the credit card companies, the cc companies could and almost all did chose to report on the account a notation that the account was being worked through a credit counseling service. While that's not something that usually gets calculated into the actual credit score formulation, it is something that anyone who pulls a credit report can see and it can be a negative mark.

InCharge was not a bad company to deal with, they did make all our payments on time, and I didn't have any issues with how they handled any of our accounts. If you do choose to go through any credit service, really really look into their records, lots of people have a lot of issue with companies taking their payments but not making the payments to the cards on time, or sometimes at all. And I have seen many companies operating under the initials CCCS/CCS/CCC and so on. It's my understanding that one of them is a good company, and then the others are trying to piggy back off that company's rep. So make sure the CCCS you dealing with is the right one.

[NiteNicole]

Thanks for the advice. I am LONG past any deferral/forbearance for student loans. Looking at it realistically, I guess they are as low as they are going to get.

The medical debt is such a pain because we have new stuff popping up all the time. Our insurance is crap and this has been the most sickly, unhealthy nine months of all three of our lives.

So they will work with credit cards even if we've never been late? I am just wondering if there's any way to get those rates down. We've called and asked and of course been told no.