If you're buried in bills, you need a credit counselor who can:

• Negotiate with your creditors to write off part of what you owe and establish a realistic, 36- to 60-month repayment schedule to retire the balance.
• Persuade them to reduce or waive many of the late fees and other penalties they've imposed.
• Stop harassing phone calls from collection agencies.
• Help re-establish your credit after all debts are paid.

Unfortunately, some of the most-heavily promoted "nonprofit" credit counselors and debt consolidation services are in it for the money. Your money. You've got to avoid them.

That's why we recommend that you go to a member of The National Foundation for Credit Counseling, the nation's biggest and oldest credit-counseling organization.

Its 120 member agencies abide by a set of professional and ethical standards that have served many individuals and families very well over the past 50 years.

Click here to to find a credit counselor in your area. Use the "Zip Code Search" to get a list of nearby agencies. Click on the individual agencies to find everything from fees to office hours.

The fees will be modest. Many NFCC members charge nothing to review your finances and less than $100 to establish a debt management plan, or DMP, as it's often called.

Kimberly Perez was fresh out of college with $18,000 in credit card bills when she went to an NFCC member in Corpus Christi, Texas.

As with most DMPs, Perez wrote a single monthly check to the agency. It divvied that money up among her creditors based on a repayment plan it had negotiated with them.

That help cost $1,200 or a little more than 6% of what Perez owed. Those fees weren't based on the size of her debt. The bills could have been bigger, but the cost would have been the same.

Contrast that with how much Kathleen Grogan paid a non-NFCC credit counseling company she found in the Connecticut phone book.

It helped her pay off $180,000 in credit card bills, wiping out $110,000 of that in negotiations with her creditors and establishing an affordable repayment plan for the remaining $91,000.

But Grogan was charged 12% of her debt, or $21,600.

She was also lucky. At least her debt reduction company did its job. Many credit counselors not affiliated with the NFCC have left trusting consumers saddled with more debt -- not less.

We have heard so many stories about unscrupulous companies that take their clients' money and never pay their creditors. Or pay too little. Or don't make the payments on time.

Here's one we saw in the Albuquerque Journal:

Photany Sattanak, a local waitress, received a call from a Florida company offering to help her pay off $3,200 in credit card debt.

Each month the company took $120 from her bank account, kept $38 or a whopping 32% of that in fees, and supposedly passed the rest along to her credit card company. It promised she'd be debt free within four years.

But after making more than three years worth of payments, Sattanak got a call from her credit card company saying she owed $3,753 -- hundreds more than the original amount.

The debt reduction company had repeatedly missed the payment deadline, she was told, running up hefty late fees and other penalties. Despite repeated complaints, her credit counselor offered no help or refund.

"It was scary what they did to me," Sattanak told the Journal.

That's why bad credit counseling can be worse than no credit counseling. Make the right choice. Go to an agency affiliated with the NFCC.

By the editors of Interest.com

Have questions about your finances? Ask us at editors@interest.com