Complaint Review: Genus/Care One - Columbia Maryland

My husband and I signed up with Genus in early 2000 (not long after Sonja) after our kids were born and our credit cards has spiraled completely out of control (yes, that's OUR fault). Genus was able to reduce our monthly payments and interest rates on MOST of our crdit cards (apparently Sears doesn't play nicely with debt management programs). Even before we signed on the dotted line we were advised to call our creditors to get our due dates in line with when our Genus payment would come out of our account. They were very helpful in determining when the best due dates would be based on when we wanted our payment deducted from our account. All the employees that helped us sign up were very pleasant and helpful. As we kept making our regular payments, we saw the balances on our accounts dropping, and realized one month that one of the accounts had just been paid off. So I notified Genus after and they transfered the payment from that account to another account, to get that one paid off faster. You see, Genus does not get your credit card statement every month. YOU get your credit card statement, and YOU are responsible for knowing when an account is going to be paid off. Once you are on the program, Genus pays what YOU agreed to pay and to whom, and if YOU don't tell them to stop paying an account, they will continue to pay. If that happens, YOU should work with your creditor to get a refund. As for a creditor not accepting the proposal, the folks at Genus may be right; The monthly payment may not be high enough to satisfy the creditor. Sears accepted our lower payment but would not lower the interest rates. Regardless, you are still obligated to pay that creditor until a proposal is accepted. If Genus is deducting money for that particular creditor, you need them to give you copies of the checks that were sent to find out where that money went. I had one account that was reported as late, and guess what? It was the creditor that mis-posted the payment! It was not due to any fault of Genus. Because of our timely payments through the program, our credit scores have increased dramatically over the past few years. We qualified for an excellent interest rate on our new mortgage, and received the best rate our credit union has for a car loan a few weeks ago. And we never paid Genus a single cent for their services! Anyway, as evidenced by the lack of negative posts on this company on this site, my experience must be the norm - I certainly see other companies getting blasted on a regular basis. A debt management program is only as good as the effort the consumer puts into making timely payments. Genus is only there to help, not to do all the work for you. You still need to take responsibility for paying on time and monitoring your monthly statements to ensure that your payments are applied properly. As a disclaimer, though, I have to say that I have no way of knowing that they are still as good as they were when we dealt with them. I would only have to assume and hope so. I hope I never need to use them again, as we have vowed to stay away from crdit cards, but if I do, based on my previous experience, I wouldn't hesitate to sign up again!