Million of people seek relief from the burdon of credit card debt.  Lots of options are available, but if your the one seeking credit card debt relief, you already under pressure.  Its difficult enough to deal with the problem without the additional stress of sorting through all the available debt relief choices.

Once you come to the realization that you need to reduce and eliminate debt, the next step is to find the right solution for you.  The solution that eliminates debt quickly and has the best chance of rapid credit recovery after you get out of debt.

Debt consolidation is an option.  This credit card debt relief is achieved in one of two ways.  Either you work with a consolidation company who contacts all of your creditors for you.  They make the arrangement, they collect a payment from you, they dissementate the payment to your assorted creditors.

The problem with most of these companies is that they charge huge fees.  Many times the first few payments just pay the consolidation company without reducing any of your debt.  The calls continue, they debts remain unpaid and you feel ripped off.

The second way to consolidate debt is to take out a loan against a secured asset, like your home.  There are a number of problems with this idea.  You really need to consider the long term consequences.  What was an unsecured credit card debt that you were having difficulty paying, is now a debt against a secured asset.  Can you pay the increased mortgage?  Can you pay it off quickly? Remember the debt isn’t gone, its just part of your mortgage now.  Do you still have the credit cards?  Will you run the credit cards back up?  Will you be able to continue to pay the higher mortgage plus the increasing credit card bills?  And lasly, will you just end up in the same situation in the future?

Debt is a fact of life in America, making debt relief a national obsession. A search for “debt relief” on Google pulls up over 34 million pages; on Yahoo and MSN, the total is over 12 million pages.

The average American household has $9,300 of credit card debt, but the share of income going to lower credit card debt has fallen to 0.3 percent.

The increase in personal debt can’t all be blamed on overspending. After adjusting for inflation, wages have been flat for the past five years while the cost of essential goods and services like housing, food, medical care and transportation have risen over 11 percent according to the Federal Reserve Board’s most recent Survey of Consumer Finances.

<b>Housing Debt</b>
Based on this study, the Washington Post recently reported that,

The debt of the typical American family earning about $45,000 a year rose 33.1 percent from 2001 to 2004, after adjusting for inflation … Housing debt has climbed notably because home prices have risen and people have borrowed against the equity in their homes. From 1989 to 2004, for example, the median mortgage debt more than doubled, from $46,900 to $96,000.