Hello all I am semi new to the forum. I have been reading for several months now and wanted some opinions if you don't mind. I was talking to my brother on the phone and said that he was going to use this Ameritrust compnay to take care of his finances. Bascially what they told him.......to let his credit cards go until charge off/collections and then he pays them to negoiate with the collection agency to pay them 25% of the bill. Then......when all the bills are paid through negoiations....they will go on to dispute the items on his credit report with the credit bearus one at a time until his report is clean. I told I thought it was a scam but he is wanting to go for it. It is going to cost him 450.00 up front and then they estimated his monthly bill will be 250.00 for 30 months. I have never heard of this kind of debt consolidation before and am interested in hearing anyone opinions or views on this type of company. Thanks I love this website and have learned so much from all of you. millie.
Personally, I don't like the smell of it. Why isn't your brother taking care of some of these items on his own? I can understand trying to reduce monthly payments but... Assuming his CC accounts are already delinquent, they'll very likely be charged off anyway. No matter what AmeriTrust tells him, that is Not a good thing. Can they guarantee that the CCs will accept a 25% payoff? And if the accounts are charged off, what guarantee does AmeriTrust give him that They will be able to remove the chargeoffs via dispute? He can do that himself for free and it will probably take a few years before a simple CRA dispute will delete the listings. No 3rd party can guarantee you a clean credit report. Why are they saying it will take 30 months? Has he looked at his credit reports yet? If it were me, I'd start working with the CC companies right now and use the $450 for a CC payment. I guess the gist of my comment is your brother needs to be in control of his credit cleanup - there's no sense paying someone else to do what he can legally and easily do himself. Also, working with so-called "credit repair" agencies can put a bad spin on his credit reports. Good luck !!
Millie, I re-read my post and wanted to clarify. When I said your brother needs to be in control of his situation, I wasn't implying that he's irresponsible (I'm not one to talk about financial responsibility just yet..lol). I simply meant that He needs to be the one who's calling the shots, rather than pay someone else his hard-earned money in the hopes that they'll fix things for him. He can do 99% of the work himself and there are plenty of people here and other places that will gladly offer advice and experiences, if needed. And frankly, it becomes a rather fun process when you start seeing results. The fine folks at AmeriTrust (or any credit repair organization) probably don't have any secret weapons that somebody here hasn't heard of or tried. You'd be surprised how quickly you can start feeling like a credit expert (at no cost). That being said, ask your brother to start gathering info, create a plan of attack and be sure to keep us updated on his progress !!
Thanks for all the comments. I understand completely what you are saying. When we were talking on the telephone, I told him that everything he was telling me, he could do himself. All of his debt is credit card debt and nothing else. I even sent him this website along with WhyChat's to give him some good reading on the subject. I figured that this Ameritrust had some sort of shadyness to it when I read their website and it goes on about debt consolidation. Mabe my brother will start reading the posts here and find out that you can do it yourself. Thanks again, millie
