Complaint Review: United Financial Systems

United Financial Systems has not kept their end of the agreement made between them and myself. Before signing up with the program, I was making my payments on time to my creditors. Because I was only able to make minimum payments, and because of high interest rates, the balances were not being reduced very quickly, so I started looking into debt consolidation and came across this company via searching on the web. I called and spoke with someone about the program and was assured that I could pay off my credit debt in about 2 1/2 to 3 years and I would save a lot of money due to interest rates being lowered significantly.

I decided to sign up with the program, so I sent all my creditor information to the company and they told me they would contact all my creditors to negotiate the lower interest rates and therefore lower payments and quicker payoff. What they did not tell me was that the initial process would take somewhere between 30 to 90 days, depending on the creditor and whether or not they accept the first proposal. Of course, my initial payment was debited from my bank account exactly when they said it would be, but payments to the creditors were not being made.  I called and spoke with someone and they assured me that this was normal and that it just takes time to get all the creditors on board. So, while I was "being patient" and waiting for them to get everything set up, my credit rating started to decline immediately due to missed payments. This happened because I was not told that I would need to continue making payments on my accounts until everything was set up, not that I had the money to be giving UFS money to make the payments and then making the payments myself on top of that! After about 3 months, all the creditors finally were on board and payments were finally being made. Only after some had to have more money than originally proposed and therefore the original payment I thought I would be paying each month went up and up. 

Another thing that was not told to me about this type of "debt consolidation" is that it is basically like a Chapter 11 bankruptcy. I found this out from a mortgage broker when I was looking into buying a home. When he looked at my credit report he informed me that I would not be able to get financing at any decent interest rate, if at all, for one, because of this "debt consolidation", for two, because I had many late payments on most all of my credit accounts because of this program.

After finally getting everything going and seemingly on track, after about 1 year (this last March) UFS just stopped sending several of my creditors payments. Since everything seemed to be going smoothly, I was not keeping a close enough eye on my statements and did not notice this. When I started receiving calls and letters from the creditors who were not receiving payments, I investigated. By this time, a second month of no payment to several creditors went by and I then contacted UFS via email. Traces were put out for the "misisng" payments and about 1 month later, 3 payments were made to the creditors who had not been receiving payments, all on the same day, again damaging my credit due to missed payments over 30 days. This was in June of this year.  In August, I noticed the same pattern was happening again. After the July and August payments were missed to several of my creditors, I contacted UFS once again to search for the missing payments. I sent the email on September 1st and on the 2nd they told me that traces were being sent out for the missing payments but it would take 7 to 10 business days.  On the 10th business day, I finally heard that the traces had found the missing payments and they were being reissued but that would take another 5 to 7 business days. After 9 business days have passed and still no missing payments OR current payments have been made, I emailed UFS once again stating the payments have still not been made. I am still in the middle of this with them. I hope to hear something back from them tomorrow and see the missing payments posted to my accounts very very soon.

Of course, through all of this, you can rest assured that there was NEVER a month that went by that the automatic debit from my bank account was late. That was ALWAYS taken out on time by UFS.