If you are in a situation where there are rupturing debt problems coming your way, the debt relief solutions will make sense to you only if they themselves are debt free. However it is not the case many times. In fact it depends on the debt relief option you opt to choose. These are: informal (free debt relief), debt relief involving qualified supervision (not free, though it may appear to be free), and full bankruptcy (which is never free). So the debt relief is option intended to help the people in severe financial crisis i.e. bankruptcy is never free although the other relief options can be free. Doesn’t it sound humorous?
You may find a lot of charitable trusts and companies which provide free informal debt relief solutions which usually try to convince the creditors to opt either for long period debt management plans or to go for debt write off where the creditor accepts a figure lower than that of the debt owed. These solutions are not the rigid ones and depend on how much experience does the counseling companies have and also the luck of their clients. In most of the cases such companies either do not charge fee or they charge only if their solution works for the client.
There are debt relief solutions such as Individual Voluntary Arrangements (IVAs) in the UK and Chapter 13 bankruptcy in the United States which require a qualified person to supervise the agreement (which involves the paying back a fraction of the debt owed over an approved period). Also the court’s intervention is required to ratify (to confirm by signature) it. Thus these solutions can’t be free as these involve the legal advice and the courts in the procedure. However no up-front fees are taken but these are accepted in the form of monthly installments.
Though it is really an injustice to ask for up-front fee for a debt relief solution but this is what the trend prevailing for the extreme debt relief solution. In UK as well as in US there exist court fees for declaring oneself bankrupt (which applies to both chapter 7 and chapter 13 bankruptcy in US). They only remedy to this to search a credit card debt counseling or local charity which would pay the bankruptcy costs. It is really tough to find these although these do subsist. Performing a local research might help your cause.