Mortgage Articles Debt Relief - Debt Settlement vs Mortgage Refinance Tip! There are many advantages to finding mortgage rate options on the Internet. First, a number of people do not like talking on the phone. Online, you can get the information regarding mortgage rate options that you need and you’ll never have to dial a button or be put on hold. Because of this, finding mortgage rate options on the Internet is often faster. In fact, some search engines give you the mortgage rate averages for a variety of nation-wide lenders in one shot. Because it is a quick way to find a good mortgage rate, you can spend your time worrying about other things, like how much you need to borrow and what fees you’ll need to pay. Online, you can also find a mortgage rate at any time of day. If you work during the day, you may find the Internet much more convenient because you can go mortgage rate shopping at night or in the very early morning hours, time when a typical lender will not be in the office to answer your mortgage rate questions over the phone. No financial planner would ever recommend a mortgage refinance (one form of debt consolidation) to get out of credit card debt. It is substituting secured debt for unsecured debt and you could lose your home over a bunch of unsecured credit card debt if you get injured or can't afford your new higher monthly payments. Also, and these are verifiable published reports, 77% of all people who refinance their way out of credit card debt are right back at the same level of credit card debt 2.5 years later on average only now with less equity in their home. So it obviously isn't fixing the problem. Mortgage Cycling Revealed 00. why? Because no behavior modification was needed. You made it too easy on them to just refinance out of cc debt. No financial planner will ever recommend that route. In settlement though they have to go without using credit cards for 2 to 3 years and do go through behavior modication as does an alcoholic in rehab. Secondly, credit counseling entries on your credit report are as bad as bankruptcy entries they will crash your FICO for 10 years and take you from a 700 FICO down to low 500's literally overnight. Debt settlement on the other hand is only a late pay on your credit report. Late pays bring down a 700+ FICO about 40-50 points, they bring down 600+ FICO's about 30 points, and bring down 500+ FICOs about 10-20 points. But more importantly, the FICO goes back up more than the drop from late pays as we eliminate the debt so their debt to income ratio goes down to zero and their FICO is back up higher than it was before they joined a settlement program even with the late pays on there, but we demand a withdrawal of the late pay entry as part of the negotiated settlement and get that 99% of the time. Superior Debt Relief is the only debt settlement company that pays for three levels of credit restoration afterwards to bring the FICO up even higher. Settlement is one of the methods used by mortgage consolidation people to get someone qualified into a home that was denied financing due to too high of a debt to income ratio.