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Get Free Help With Your Debts!

As the UK slowly starts to wake up to the enormity of its £1.1 trillion consumer debt, it comes as no surprise to hear that calls to Britain's largest debt-help charity have doubled over the past year.

Registered charity the Consumer Credit Counselling Service received 170,000 calls for help last year, and currently carries out more than 1,000 in-depth counselling appointments every week. The CCCS is sponsored by some of the more enlightened lenders which would rather get most of their money back, rather than force County Court Judgements and bankruptcy on their borrowers. Its free service is currently helping 43,000 people on debt-management plans to repay more than £8 million a month to creditors.

It's not surprising that many people need practical help with sorting out their debts. The idea of writing to creditors, asking them to freeze interest rates and/or accept lower monthly payments, can be daunting. The larger debt-counselling organisations also wield more authority, so a creditor is more likely to agree to a debt-management plan when the request comes from an organisation such the CCCS, rather than an individual. And it's far easier to make one monthly payment to a single organisation, which then distributes it amongst your creditors on your behalf.

Alternatives to the CCCS include Payplan, which also provides a free debt-management service. Reports on our Dealing with Debt discussion board from people using the service are good. After an initial phone call, Payplan calls you back at a convenient time to go through the details of how much you owe and to whom, before drawing up a debt-management plan and contacting creditors on your behalf.

National Debtline is another free and independent service, which is funded by the Department of Trade and Industry and the credit industry. It provides self-help advice to its callers and produces written self-help packs and factsheets as support. Where necessary, it will also help callers set up debt-management plans by sorting out your payments and talking to creditors for you.

And then there's Citizens Advice, probably the most well-known consumer organisation. It has offices all over the country where you can get face-to-face help. The service is patchy, though, as some offices are too small to offer trained debt counsellors, so their main role is essentially to help you to help yourself, rather than setting up debt-management plans for you.

Fianlly, if you feel you can work on your debt problems by yourself, then use our Get Out of Debt centre as your guide. Good luck with tackling your debts!