Hi! It's LaTisha from YoungFinances.com today I'm going to talk a little bit more about how paid off my $22,000 worth of credit card debt. I've had a couple of people ask me about the credit counseling service that I used to help me pay off that debt and so I wanted to answer those questions today. The first question was how did I find them? I know that there may be some credit counseling services out there that are not very reputable. There are some that I've heard horror stories so I can completely understand this question. A friend of mine introduced me to the service. They had great success with it and they were able to pay off their debt within three years. The service that I used Is based out of Atlanta. It's a consumer credit counseling service the name of the service is called Clearpoint. That's the service I used to help me pay off all of my debt. Someone else asked me, how much did it cost? I had to pay a monthly fee it was a small monthly fee.

I think one month I paid $35 and then as my payments went down each month than I paid a smaller and smaller monthly service fee to Clearpoint. So that actually goes hand-in-hand with the next question which is what with my monthly bill? My monthly bill started off pretty high. I had a lot of debt that I added to it. I had $26,000 of debt that I added to the debt management plan. So what they do is they set you up with a debt management plan and help you to figure out how to pay down your debt and pay off your debt within a certain timeframe whatever timeframe that you want to do. Typically it's three years and I opted for three years. So what happened was when they were setting up my debt management plan I put all of my debt on there like I said it was about $26,000 I realized I had doubled up on one creditor because one of them was already in collections I had two people collecting on the same debt so once I removed that debt it came down to about 22,000 and then I wanted to pay everything off in three years so I wanted to make sure that after three years I was completely done so we worked on a payment that was comfortable and something I was able to make along with making the rest of my payments that I had to make on my budget but something that would also help me to pay off all the debt within three years.

So the payment that was settled on at the beginning was $800 and I paid it every paycheck I paid $400 then after a while it even things started to get a little bit tighter for me where I felt like I wasn't able to really manage that so all I did was I gave them a call and let them know that my budget has changed a little bit would they be willing to help me negotiate down to $600 a month and so we were able to work together to figure out how I could do that. I was able to work with them and they help you create a budget.

That's one thing that they helped me to do was create a budget to see what I could pay and how I can do this and really get rid of my debt within three years that was very helpful. And then the last question is what was the biggest advantage of working with Clearpoint? One of the biggest advantages is that they contacted all of my creditors and negotiated my interest rates down. In most cases they were able to negotiate the high interest rates that I had of 22% to 24% and they were able to negotiate that down to 0% for a lot of my creditors they were also able to help me remove some of the fees and get fee concessions for me. My debt was pretty delinquent at the time so they were able to call and negotiate.

So they did all of the negotiations for me in that instance whereas I might have been able to get some of that down but and they were really good at that so that helped a lot. It really helped me to pay all of that debt within three years. Another thing that they did was they were the contact person for all of my creditors. If I had creditors calling and some of them I it were in collections all I did was say "hey I'm working with a credit counseling service and you can contact them if you have any questions or if you want to know what payments are available to be made because they are handling it all." I don't know what it is not think of something in the industry where if you're working with a credit counseling service the creditors they just don't bother you they will call the credit counseling service.

So they called the credit counseling service and Clearpoint was able to talk to them. I didn't have to worry about being scared my phone ringing all the time and figuring out "Should pick it up or not?" Because at the time and I had a lot of debt it was a point where it was very stressful and I talked about that in the blog post on how I paid off my $22,000 of debt. It was very stressful. Yeah so that was the biggest advantage them being able to save me a ton of money on fees, they saving money on interest rates and they were able to contact and talk to my creditors and be that liaison. So that's my experience with Clearpoint as a credit counseling service like I said I used them to help me pay off my $22,000 worth of debt.

If you have debt and you have more questions on how you can pay off debt, your options and maybe more questions about debt feel free to contact me at YoungFinances.com or you can leave a comment in the box below just fill it up with any and all of your questions and I will be sure to either answer them in the comment section or create a video response for you. Make sure you head over to YoungFinances.com where I've got more information on debt, building credit and getting your finances on the right track so that you can become a financial success. And finally if you liked this video and it gave you some good information, give it a thumbs-up! I really appreciate all the support from you guys and hope to see you next time.

Ok bye..