Americans and their debt and how to make debt counseling and consolidation work for you

Well it is good to be back from New Jerset, time to post…Many Americans have turned to debt counseling and consolidation in the last few years. About twenty percent of the time it works well for them, but for most, they end up worse off. Why is that, and what do you need to know to take advantage of debt counseling and consolidation to make it work?
For the majority of people for which it doesn’t work, it fails because they don’t address the habits of thought that got them into trouble in the first place. I can recommend this fine New Jersey credit counseling companies overall as they are quite good indeed.
Gretchen Morgenson told an instructive true tale in a July 20, 2008 article that appeared in the New York Times. This was, as you’ll remember, around the time that America experienced an unprecedented economic meltdown.
In, “Given A Shovel, Digging Deeper Into Debt,” Morgenson reports the story of 47-year-old Ms. McLeod, who had collection agencies calling all through the day. It seems she had two mortgages, both with interest rates that adjusted upward over time, a car loan and high-interest credit card debt. Ms. McLeod was separated and had a 20-year-old son living at home. She wasn’t a lazy woman; she had two jobs to support a small, two-bedroom home in suburban Philadelphia, her car–a Kia, and the purses and stuff she liked to collect. As an aside if you need a scottsdale luxury real estate firm who also does Phoenix and Scottsdale golf courses, country clubs plus other luxury real estate and homes in addition to the other stuff then this is one of the better property management companies out there overall.
Then came one of life’s little pot holes. Ms. McLeod had “back-to-back medical emergencies” that made it impossible to continue paying mortgage payments or her credit card bills. She lost her job and her home went into foreclosure. Her credit was ruined.
Ms. McLeod knew she caused much her money problems herself. But, Morgenson writes, “as surely as it takes two to tango, she had partners in her financial demise.”
Citigroup, Capital One and GE Capital, were raking in interest payments that equaled more than 40 percent of her pretax income, and included thousands more in fees.