You have landed on the right page for a quick rundown on how using a debt consolidation agency might affect you credit rating!

First of all a quick question or two:

Why are you concerned about your credit score in your current situation?

This question is not meant to be a bit pedantic, the real concern here is why you would need to be too bothered about ratings?

You should be more concerned with repairing damage done to your way of life due to adverse credit and troublesome demands for payment of household bills.

The simple solution to repairing your already damaged credit score is to find help to solve your debt problems and start a payment plan that you can afford and pay off that money owed to creditors - and only then should you start to be concerned about credit scores.

You have to realize that dropping 50 points on your credit score is not going to affect your ability to get a loan too much at this stage regarding your finances. Plus for every loan application that gets knocked back by a creditor, you may find s little black mark go against your name in any case. So for now bite the bullet and concentrate on consolidating your loans and other bills.

As for debt consolidation agencies ruining your credit score, the damage was done long ago when your debts started to mount, a debt consolidator will not adversely affect your ratings any more than they already are, instead your scores will gradually go back up if you keep up with your payments on any consolidatory loan you have been given by the consolidators' service.

There have been cases where a person has not kept up with these consolidation loan payments - it is this reason why a person can have their credit standing downgraded. This is usually where a person may write a bad review on a web forum or the like regarding debt consolidation services.

In respect to yourself, you have taken these first steps to honesty and admitted you have a debt problem - it would be nice to hear back from you in the near future saying; "great I am now free of debt!"

Good luck!