How Does Our DMP Program Work?
Debt management plans are only offered to consumers who are having a difficult time paying their unsecured debts and have completed a budget counseling session with one of our certified credit counselors indicating that lower debt payments are needed. The program steps and requirements for eligible consumers are as follows.
Enrollment Phase
- You provide DMCC with a list of your creditors and current account information.
- DMCC quotes you an estimated monthly program payment based upon the information you provide. The program is designed so that your monthly payment will remain the same during the entire plan term.
- DMCC provides you a written summary of your budget counseling session and a client agreement containing all of the terms of the program, including your scheduled creditor payments and our fees.
- You verify the accuracy of your budget and creditor information, review and execute the client agreement, and complete the accompanying ACH form authorizing DMCC to withdraw the initial setup fee from your bank account.
- You return the executed client agreement and ACH form to DMCC.
Setup Phase
- Upon receipt of your executed documents, DMCC will contact you to review the accuracy of your creditor information, answer any questions you may have, make any required adjustments to your debt management plan, and provide you an ACH form authorizing DMCC to withdraw the monthly plan payments from your bank account.
- You contact each of your creditors and advise them of the following:
– That you have enrolled in our program.
– That you want them to close your account immediately.
– That they should contact DMCC for any additional information they need about your account. The number they can reach us at is 954-861-3113. - Ten days prior to the date your first monthly program payment is scheduled to be disbursed to your creditors, DMCC will send proposals to each of your creditors requesting that they accept the proposed monthly payment and reduce interest rate that you were quoted, stop assessing your account late fees, and report your account as current to the major credit bureaus (note: not all creditors will re-age your accounts and report them as current).
- Your creditors will either accept or reject our proposed monthly payment according to their individual policies and review of your account history. If a creditor accepts our proposal, they will provide the program benefits. If a creditor rejects our proposal, they will generally notify DMCC as to the reason why. DMCC will in turn notify you and, if the deficiency can be corrected, will submit a new proposal to the creditor. This process will continue until proposals for each of your accounts are accepted by your creditors or, if it is determined that your creditor will not accept any proposal or you do not wish to accept the terms your creditor requires, your account is removed from the program. Many collection and medical account creditors, for example, will not formally accept DMP proposals. However, they typically agree to accept your payments from DMCC, which will stop their collection calls and allow you to have one consolidated monthly payment to DMCC for all your accounts.
- During this setup phase and until a proposal has been accepted by your creditor, you remain responsible for payments to your creditor for the minimum payment required by your original agreement with them. During this time, your creditor will continue to charge interest at the pre-existing rate and if the monthly payments to your creditor are insufficient or late, they will most likely assess late fees and report your account as delinquent to the major credit bureaus.
Plan Term
- Your creditors dictate the benefits they will provide to you, including when the benefits become available and when and under what circumstances the benefits will end. Most benefits, particularly the suppression of fees and re-aging of an account, do not become available until your creditor receives the third consecutive timely monthly payment following their acceptance of our proposal.
- During the plan term it is imperative that you remit your consolidated monthly payment to DMCC in a timely manner, so that we are able to disburse payments to your creditors within each billing cycle.
- DMCC will disburse your monthly program payments to your creditors immediately upon clearing our bank. ACH payments require 4 business days to clear; other payment methods will clear sooner or later based on standard banking policies.
- Most creditors will terminate your benefits if a payment is missed during a billing cycle and some of them will not allow you to re-enroll in the program for a period of 1 to 5 years.
- You should notify DMCC within 30 days of any fee that your creditor assesses to your account and you wish to contest. DMCC is not responsible for any fees your creditor may assess, but will assist you with questioning fees that the creditor agreed to suppress pursuant to our proposal.
- You can access your account with DMCC online at www.dmcccorp.org by clicking on “Client Login” button and logging in with the username and password provided to you during the enrollment phase. On your online account you can view your program documents and all payments posted during the plan term, including the distribution of payments to your creditors.
- During the plan term DMCC encourages you to take its free online financial literacy course, Debt Money & Credit Concepts, and take advantage of the free educational materials DMCC offers on a variety of financial topics both online and in print. You may also contact DMCC counselors to review and revise your budget at anytime if needed.
