Beyond the stress of knowing your money, the consequences of unpaid credit card debts varies depending on the situation and the credit card issuer. I am Scott Shaefer, a trustee with Hoyes Michalos and Associates. Some of the possible outcomes are you will be charged late payment fee, you'll be charged interest. You could have the details reported on your credit report of the late payment. The longer it remains outstanding, the more significant hit it will be on your credit report and the worse your score can become, your interest rates could increased. But here are some of the more extreme outcomes you will have debt collectors calling you, the count could be written off on your credit report, which really significantly reduces your score. There could be court action. You could have your wages garnished or your bank account seized. But keep in mind that these these circumstances are usually done over time. Time makes a difference. So the longer things are, the worse it will be.
Late payments can be reported on your credit report for up to six years. If you don't need new credit, you might be able to wait it out. But the debt does not go away, and you may not be able to tolerate the low credit score. So if you're looking at dealing with your debts, there's four different solutions. You could try to work a payment plan with a credit card provider, ask them to reduce interest rates, asking for a reduction in their late fees to make it more manageable for you. But if the debts old that may not be viable for you. Might one of them try to do a debt settlement, a settlement of that credit card where you try to work out a deal on it, but make sure if you're working a deal, you get that deal in writing first.
Then if there late payments on these credit cards and you've got other debts you're having trouble with. You might want to try one of the legal solutions, one of the government solutions, which is a consumer proposal or a bankruptcy. A consumer proposal is where you can legally settle your debts together in one monthly payment. If you want to learn more visit us at Hoyes dot com..
[Text: Warnings about Credit Counseling] Hi there. This is Michael Bovee with
Consumer Recovery Network.com and I want to continue on with our credit counseling
video series with some cautions or warnings about whether or not you should
even go down that path. We talked about he suitability of credit
counseling in the prior video what credit counseling is and how it works. It really does boil down to being able to
qualify financially your monthly income with all your bills, the bills that
are enrolled like credit cards. Add them all up and 2% of that total will
be your monthly payment so it is kind of easy to do the math.
What is kind of more subjective is should you and what I mean by that is if you commit
to that plan you are going to be spending money, resources and time committed
to that path over about a 4 or 5 year period.
So if you are only marginally suited to a credit counseling service you get started,
you got $20,000 fort the debt 2% of that and your new monthly payments $400
and it is really thin for you.
You are not saving money every month
for emergencies because you won't be using these credit cards anymore.
They are closed as part of your enrollment in the program.
You have to be prepared for life happening around you because when does it not.
It does. 6 months down the road if you paid $400
a month you paid $2400 and let's say in month 7 something does occur and
you are not prepared for it. You miss a payment on your credit counseling
plan the debt management plan. You lose the benefits often of the
interest rate conceptions that the creditors grant you. Your lower payments are no longer sufficient
to meet the obligation and the plan falls of the rails. So what happened? Well you wasted
6 months on a solution that was not going to work for you and $2400.
What would that $2400 have done as an alternative? Well the average national cost of
bankruptcy and this includes the attorney's fees and the current cost
and everything is about $1800 if you are on the coastal cities that could range $2210
and sometimes while we are in some of the Midwest and smaller municipality, but if
you filed bankruptcy chapter 7 the debt is gone and you get that fresh start.
Everybody wants to avoid bankruptcy and I get that, believe me I get that.
But sometimes it is the right decision to make and in this instance it could fall
off your credit counseling plan you would have covered your bankruptcy and probably
after 6 months in 3 months on the other side of it and already recovering financially.
That $2400 also could have funded 2 settlements.
Let's say you had $20,000 wirth of debt and all of them 5 accounts $4,000 balances,
$2400 might have settled 1 or 2 of your credit cards and you are almost halfway to a solution
that might have only lasted 2 years. So it is important to not just to
do the math, but to project. Credit counseling is generally best for
someone who can meet that monthly payment that newer lower monthly payment, but
also somebody who has a dependable and consistent income. Another caution and I will
end the video with this.
You will not want to enroll accounts that
are past a certain level of delinquency. Advanced delinquency is typically
charge off or beyond. Charge off as it is used by credit card
lenders happens about 180 days consecutive nonpayment so for 6 months.
If you have got accounts that are charged off they no longer can be re-aged in one
of the benefits of credit counseling we talked about in the prior video and if you
do enroll them and let's say it is with a debt buyer or something like that
and you fall off the plan, they might have reduced your interest rate with
an agreement that hey everything is going to get charged up retroactively
if you fall off the plan. Absolutely very little benefit to
enrolling charged off credit card and other unsecured accounts came
to a credit counseling service.
Given the fact that life happens and if
you fall off not only did you lose a benefit but you probably didn't even end
up paying down much of the debt if any when you enroll charged off accounts
so be very careful about that. There are credit counseling agencies out
there that will just throw Willy Nilly and rolled accounts in there.
Be careful of who you actually work with in a credit counseling service because
while many even do a lot of the same services, not all of them are created equal.
We prefer Cambridge credit counseling a national firm that does outstanding work.
It publishes all their data, their success rates, check them out.
