CDS was hired last year when we ran into financial difficulties, having had our insurance rates tripled and certain banks (credit cards) raising or doubling their minimum payments monthly. Since income didn't increase, we were unable to pay what wasn't in our budget.
CDS promises to help. They say they will stop your creditors calls and harassment. They will work hard to negotiate settlement with creditors on our behalf and in return we set up a trust fund with them to pay said customers when settlement is made. Well we are a year into this process now. We have about 3500.00 in our trust fund. That doesn't count the 1000.00 we have additionally paid to CDS for their initial fee and a monthly maintenance fee of 49.00, which they haven't earned yet.
We get nothing from them. The only time we have contact is when we have to call them because we are still being bothered with creditor calls it seems and then it takes hours, sometimes days to get a call back.
One of the creditors we placed with CDS is now suing us. WE went through this entire process for nothing basically. Also CDS doesn't settle your accounts really. They build up a trust for you but most accounts, which they don't tell you never settle because money takes years to build up and creditors aren't paid until the entire amount of pay off is in your trust account. What creditor is going to agree to this? None I know.
Plus after a few years the statute of limitations is up and they can't sue you anyway. They aren't getting monthly payments like you would think from that trust fund. On top of this if they do negotiate settlement for you and save you any money. They want 25 percent of what they saved you as their commission, for basically doing nothing for years.
WE were told when we signed up that credit would take a brief hit. A few months before creditors would work out something with them. Well here we are a year later... Nothing has changed except CDS is getting the money our creditors should be and our credit is plumeting more each day.
We have to pull out our trust funds now to pay a local attorney to answer this lawsuit and possibly file a bankruptcy, which is what we were trying to avoid and what our creditor told us to do by going to a credit counselor in the first place. Back to square one.
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