Money Tailor.

We have been recieving 2-3 phone calls a day from "Global Debt Management" offering to reduce our credit card debt. These calls were really getting us down so the last time they called my wife asked to speek to higher and higher people and it turns out that infact she asked for them to call us regarding reducing our debts.

We currently have £8000 debt on our cards which we acrued before my daughter was born disabled and my wife could not return to her £40,000 a year job leaving only my £18,000 a year income (now more like £15,000) and have struggled financially ever since.

We arranged an appointment to see a man from "Money Tailor" who are registered with the FSA and offer a government backed scheme to reduce credit card debts for people in poverty. The man did some calculations and basically said that after the mortgage payments, council tax, etc etc we had a "disposable income" of £30 and therefore that was all we can afford to pay to the credit card companies (3 in total). This was relieving for us to hear as that seems about right but the credit card companies insist that we can afford somewhere more like £280 and have therefore refused to freeze the interest so at the moment we are more or less simply paying the interest every month.

A while ago we spoke to the CCCS who gave us a plan of action which we followed but this just kept ending up with threats of court action and since we do not have the money to pay a solicitor we just followed their plan, so what "Money Tailor" are offering sounds pretty appealing...

...But they want to cahrge a £600(ish) fee to put the action in place, and then want to take a £15 per month fee to write the cheques to the 3 card companies. They are proposing to set a 5 year plan whereby the first 3 months we pay them £215(ish), and then £30 per month thereafter for the remainder of the 5 years. After the 5 year term we have the option to pay off half of the debt which will settle the debt in full (for which we pay them 5% of what they save us) or start another 5 year plan.

This all sounds pretty appealing however alarm bells are ringing! We are paying them more for this service than we are paying back to the credit card companies over the next 5 years. Over the 5 years the debt will only decrease by a few hundred pounds. There was a pretty hard sell, and I tend to believe that if a product needs a hard sell then it is not what it is cracked up to be - a good product should sell itself! There is no such thing as a free lunch. Are we going to see them on watchdog in a few weeks or months time after they have run away with our money? How will this affect our chances of re-mortgaging in 6 months when our current fixed deal runs out? How will it affect out credit score in the future?

What I want to know is has anyone had dealings with this company? Is there a DIY system that we can follow and avoid the companies fees and put it towards paying off the card debts? Is there another company offering a similar service for less money (or preferably free)?