At the very outset, let’s understand that debt management is the only refinancing of loans that will make all your debts become manageable. At best, you could lose a few of your creditors and mortgage payments when finding a new loan.
Debt management, as in home mortgage refinancing, involves taking out a new mortgage that pays off your existing mortgages and other outstanding loans. This is another form of refinancing and therefore it entails a new loan that stays in effect until a new one is issued.
In any event, you will go for a debt management plan only when you have stopped paying your creditors and are looking at fresh loans and new credit cards. You discover a new source of credit, a new loan, and it takes care of all existing payments and the old lenders approach you as if nothing happened. Before entering into a DMP you must realize that your creditors don’t realize that you are in a DMP, which could be why you have trouble finding new credit.
One of the strategies a counselor might implement is getting unprintable written permission from you and your creditors on how your credit will now work. So the bottom line here is that a counselor needs to get the full picture from you and prepare applicable monthly expenses in relation to the future payments you will have to make.
Therefore, have a clear understanding of what service you are signing and absolutely must get it from a certified nonprofit agency in your area with both the state and the federal government regulatory agencies among others. Know that in applying for a DMP you may well need to contact each creditor you owe money to and get yourself enrolled. This is both to find out if you have a DMP plan and to get your payments in order, and is included with the counseling’s aim to help you achieve debt freedom. Or you could have already done so, so if you have, contact the counselor you are working with, explain your financial situation and why you are in a DMP, and ask what form they would provide this month depending on the amount of your monthly payments.
Don’t fall into the trap of having your counselor change your payments completely. Other things you need to realize about DMP services is they cannot start until you complete your creditors’ monthly payments if you happen to be one of the unemployed, see you are on hardship, or have a court judgment against you, are on child support payments or served in the military. Another thing that many people do not know about debt management counselors is that you can sign up for this plan while still paying your monthly payments and what you have done is simply turned your loans into one smaller payment each month and your payments have all been consolidated into one.
It is extremely important that you check this plan out with your paperwork beforehand to ensure that you are only receiving what you have said you are able to get – so get all the paperwork together approach your counselor and find out what is the limit and start getting your debts together today. One other pitfall with counseling services is that suddenly your bills may be hit with a large prepayment penalty as it is not uncommon to discover that a large prepayment penalty is in effect if you pay off early or to the amount the counselor suggested and here you need to be careful because there is a lot more behind the prepayment penalty than seemed showed in print.
If you are in particularly bad shape your counselor will do a service analysis and someone may advise you to pay off as much as you can and let it go, however the monthly payment may be so large that over time this monthly prepayment does nothing but put you further into debt. So, only proceed with a DMP after you have read these cautionary warnings. Also, when discussing how a DMP works ask about the options if a lender pays in full rather than at the negotiated value due to the borrower’s difference of the payments and interest computed at the time of the DMP.
Also ask what the monthly payment should be. Most of all ask if there are negative ramifications or risks of having a so-called counselor managed your money. Sometimes a counselor can warn you against a service and quickly mention a credit report score for your credit completion, however after you complete this important service and you are credited a bill, your credit may have already been destroyed anyway.
In Currently Non Collectable, your counselor may tell the borrower to stop paying their bills after completing the DMP and if that does not work you may need to talk directly to the creditor, but make sure to ask careful questions and find out if there are any special benefits or aversion to having to pay monthly on a different track for a period of time. And always have a plan if your DMP is not working the way you expected it in the beginning to help you achieve success in paying off your debts.