has anyone used a company such as “Freedom Debt Relief” where they negotiate with the credit card company’s to get you out of debt?

I have used a consolidation company before, CCBC I think. They were great and helped a lot a few years ago.

I would definitely like to consolidate the debt somehow. For now I have figure out a pretty good budget and I’m proud and a bit relieved to see that we have money to put where we need it most.

My husband is in the Navy and will be getting out in about a year. We are not sure how much he will be makingin the civilian world, so I’m sure we’ll have to adjust. Obviously then, the less debt, the better.

We hired a company called Elite Financial. Here we are 1-1/2 years later and only one small debt has been negotiated. Our original balance was $2200, which climbed to $3300 with all the interest and fees tacked on, and we settled for $2600!!! Plus we had to pay them $153.00 on top of that.

We have just hired a financial planner we found on Dave Ramsey’s website and we will pull out all the funds we have in the account they set up and use it for our snowball.

I’ll keep everyone posted on our progress with the financial planner using DR strategy.

I’m not sure I understand what you mean by how? I was able to allot money into all the important catagories and even for X-mas shopping so I’m not hit by that all at once. I should have enough for bills, extra to pay on credit cards, savings, etc. etc. Before I just lumped all the “extra” money together. For example, after paying bills I usually had about $600 leftover each check. That was money for gas, groceries, etc. Well it probably went towards etc. more than anything, and then the money was gone. We didn’t feel like money was tight, but never felt like we had any extra to put in savings. I was amazed to see that I could actually put money aside to save and still be able to buy gas and groceries and breathe.