New Body Launched to Help Canadians in Financial Crisis

The Canadian Association of Credit Counselling Services Begins Its Journey

First Published: ADawnJournal.com April 5, 2009

The credit crisis has bitten deep in many countries the world over. Perhaps as a result of the many alerts that have been sounded worldwide in the last few years, it had seemed like people were taking a rather skeptical view of this crisis. When you take into account that the Y2K bug never really stung – or at least planes did not fall from the sky and in fact the world kept operating much as it had before – and that although bird flu claimed more lives than one would have hoped, it never really reared up into the crisis it may have been, it is easy to see why there were people who brushed off the idea of the credit crunch. But it is here, and it is very real.

More and more Canadians are now having to admit that they are being sucked into the trouble that the crisis has caused. People are losing their jobs and their homes, and as a consequence there is a very real human cost to all of this. Although Canada was one of the last countries to submit to the global credit crisis, it has certainly succumbed to some extent, and the people being affected range from the high earners to the low-paid. Although the sound financial policies practised more widely in Canada than almost anywhere else mean that we will be one of the first countries to recover, that may be a while off yet. In the meantime it is essential that there are people out there to provide help for those who are at the mercy of the credit crunch, and that is why people should be relieved at the founding of the Canadian Association of Credit Counselling Services (CACCS).

Credit counselling is a vitally important step in putting people on the right footing to deal with this crisis. The existence of paid-for debt counselling is something that is really not helping the current situation, and if you have been considering putting your debt matters in the hands of a company who promise to get your finances sorted out “for a small monthly fee”, please reconsider. If anyone says that you paying them to fix things will help you out of debt, then they are lying to you. There are services who will do the same thing free of charge, and they are generally far better qualified than the fly-by-night profit-based debt management companies.

CACCS are dedicated to providing an umbrella under which the not-for-profit credit counselling services can operate, and raising awareness of the services they provide. If you think about it, the profit-making companies who purport to offer the same service are going to have less incentive to get you out of debt – because the longer you are paying them to “sort things out”, the better for their profit margin. If you are working with one of those organizations, take the first steps towards kicking them into the long grass today and contact CACCS at their website (www.caccs.ca)