<prompt> Human: Hello,I keep seeing billboards around to go see people about debt solutions and how they can help you out. But when you have a loan to pay back Im not sure how they can help aside from just telling you not to spend on other stuff, or in other words helping you budget. Are there other little work arounds that i am unaware of? Also do things like this affect your credit score? Or is it actually people just there to help you? This is a pretty hypothetical question Im just curious if anybody had insight into these sorts of things.  <response>: Here is a common way this works.Say you have 1000m to pay on the debts and the total debts add to like 1500m.They will offer you to pay to them the 1000m and they will worry about the rest. So you do it and let them take the reins.They immediately stop paying on all your accounts, sending each of them straight into defaulting. This will drop your credit score straight to zero.They will at this point charge you a fee of a few thousand and all your payments until that fee is paid off will go straight to them as profits OR they will just take maybe 250m straight off the top of every payment until you are done.Those are the two most common arrangements.Say its the latter. They will take the extra 750m and put it basically into a savings account. Every month they will just slip the money into that savings account.From there, they will contact each lender offering to settle the debts for pennies on the dollar. Maybe they offer 25 of the balance. That 750 might pay off a loan for 3000 if the original lender agrees.If the original lender agrees to this, they have no further claim on you. The black marks from that lender will absolutely stay with you, however.If they dont get any takers, they will just wait for the next months money to come in and offer them another round. The same deal probably still stands, 25 cents on the dollar for whatever lender takes.If nobody takes, they will just wait another month and send out more offers of payoff.The idea here is that the lenders will probably at some point rather have some money than no money. At some point, they should all give in.During that wait time, your credit gets hammered non stop.If you wait long enough, all the debts should get paid off, even if some of them wont take pennies on the dollar. Maybe you just have to save 750m out of the 1000m and eventually pay the last holdout 100 on the dollar to be rid of the last debt and you have to pay that 250m overhead for nothing then.After long enough, you should be debt free, though.You could do all that yourself just fine if you wanted to and without paying thousands in fees.The only real value you get is to have somebody else making these contacts on your behalf and you can direct hate calls to the company thats sitting between you.Thats worth something, but maybe not worth what you are paying for it. 