Take control of your credit and finances with credit counseling

Building credit is a gradual process. The time it takes to build or rebuild credit varies based on your credit history, balances, payment activity, and other factors.

No. Checking your own credit report is a soft inquiry, and soft inquiries never affect your score. Hard inquiries, the kind lenders run when you apply for new credit, can ding your score a few points temporarily. Checking your own report, on the other hand, costs you nothing, no matter how often you do it.

Yes. We work with clients who have no credit history at all, walking through options like secured credit cards, becoming an authorized user on someone else's account, or a credit-builder loan, then help you figure out which one actually fits your situation instead of trying all three at once.

Yes. As one of the nation's HUD-approved, NFCC-member credit counseling organizations, we don't charge for the first session, period. There's no cost to speak with a certified counselor, review your credit report, and walk away with an actual plan, and no obligation to enroll in anything afterward.

The fastest wins usually come from paying down credit card balances to lower utilization, disputing report errors, and ensuring all payments are on time. Your counselor will prioritize the actions with the biggest immediate impact for your specific situation.

Yes, though it takes time. Most people see their score move within a year or two of consistent on-time payments. Your counselor will build a plan around what actually happened, bankruptcy and foreclosure affect your credit differently, and help you re-establish a positive payment history from there.

A Debt Management Plan (DMP) through a nonprofit credit counseling agency pays your debt in full, usually at a reduced interest rate your counselor negotiates with your creditors, through one consolidated monthly payment. Debt settlement, often sold by for-profit debt settlement companies, is a different kind of debt relief: it negotiates to pay less than you owe, but it usually requires you to stop paying your creditors first, which can hurt your credit score and invite collection calls or lawsuits while you save up the settlement amount. A DMP tends to be steadier and less damaging to your credit. Debt settlement can be faster if it works, but it doesn't always work, and the risk sits with you in the meantime.

No, and the difference matters. Credit repair companies focus on disputing items on your credit report, which can help if something is genuinely inaccurate, but they can't legally remove accurate negative information no matter what they promise. Credit counseling, sometimes called debt counseling when the focus is your debt specifically, looks at the whole picture: your income, your debt, your spending, and builds a plan to fix what's actually driving your score down, whether that's high balances, missed payments, or both. If your credit report has real errors, we'll help you dispute them. If it doesn't, we'll help you fix what's real instead of paying someone to chase what isn't there.