How will credit counseling services affect my credit rating?

I am thinking about allowing a credit counseling service (Take Charge America) to consolidate all my unsecured credit. Will this help or hurt my credit rating once I complete the program in about 3.5 years?|||From experiences I have heard, most of the people I talked with hated it. Payments kept being late and creditors kept calling.





In the end, their credit was worse off than before, just without the debt.





Your millage will vary.|||Let me warn you - Take Charge America Sucks!





For your info:





Credit counseling, or signing up for a debt management plan, is a very common form of online debt consolidation. There are many companies offering online credit counseling, which is essentially a way to make one payment directly to the credit counseling agency, which then distributes that payment to your creditors. Most times, a credit counseling agency will be able to lower your monthly payments by getting interest rate concessions from your lenders or creditors. It is important to understand that in a credit counseling program, you are still repaying 100% of your debts 鈥?but with lower monthly payments. On average, most online credit counseling programs take around five years. While most credit counseling programs do not impact your FICO score, being enrolled in a credit counseling debt management plan DOES show up on your credit report鈥?and, unfortunately, many lenders look at enrollment in credit counseling akin to filing for Chapter 13 Bankruptcy 鈥?or using a third party to re-organize your debts.