"We can reduce what you owe."

Settle your credit card for less."

You may have seen some of these claims from debt reliefcompanies that purport to reduce your payments on credit cards or other personal loans by negotiating a payment plan with your creditors. Their pledge to you is that, with their help, you will pay less and get out of debt faster. In our experience, these programs oftentimes result in tremendous damage to an individual’s credit as well as unnecessary legal trouble.

If you are struggling to pay off your debt, you may be tempted to enlist the help of a debt relief company. These companies typically advise you to stop contact with your creditors, cease making payments, and instead pay the debt relief company monthly. They will claim to contact your creditors to create a “payment plan” and disburse your money evenly
among them according to the payment plan you agreed upon. At
FPCCFCU, we have seen members enter into these agreements
and, in our experience, the debt relief company never makes contact with us or disburses the money the member has paid to them. It’s important to note that even if the debt relief company does contact your creditors, they are not obligated to agree to a payment plan, so they may penalize you as if you had simply stopped your monthly payments.

What we typically see when a member hires a debt relief company is the member defaults on their loan and is sent to our legal collection agency, causing garnishments, court appearances and other costly and stressful
financial problems.

If you are struggling to pay off your debt, we are here to help. FPCCFCU has several in-house certified credit counselors whose job it is to prevent your financial situation from getting worse. As a member, you are entitled to free financial counseling, through which we can analyze your credit and formulate a plan to help strengthen it.