With the recession still in full swing, the unemployment rate still extremely high and the competitive nature of the current job market a personal financial professional should look at new ways to expand his or her horizons, adding a credit counseling certification to your tool belt could be very helpful in your career as a personal finance professional.
Whether you are a bankruptcy attorney or a certified financial planner having a certified counseling certification could help you assist your clients secure a strong financial future. You never know when you’re going to need something so useful, and with millions of Americans in deep credit card debt there is a strong chance that you’re going to need this certification as some point in your career.
Basically a counseling certification provides a personal financial professional with the knowledge to help a consumer avoid and get out of financial difficulties. With a lot of individuals they may just need a little hand holding in regards to being educated on debt and how to stay out of financial debt problems. The first goal of credit counseling is spreading financial literacy amongst consumers, and properly educating individuals on how to recognize debt problems and how to get out of them.
Credit counseling certification training program may or may not come with a training manual. A solid training curriculum will include real-world examples of talking with interested customers who have real credit card debt. Sometimes a curriculum includes a written exam and will need to be passed before a trainee can receive a certificate. Trainees will need to work with customers one-on-one so they can learn how to interact with consumers with debt challenges; some of what a credit counselor can expect to deal with is how to successfully work with customers in developing a budget and a game plan to defeat debt, how to read a credit report, and how to challenge creditors with errors on their credit report. A big part of credit counseling is learning how to negotiate with creditor’s better terms on credit card debt on behalf of their customers.
Counselors must be of the utmost integrity and should abide by a strong code of ethics due to the fact that they are dealing with quite a bit of personal financial information, and are entrusted with helping customers out of tough situations. A credit counselor is going to have to be well versed in the art of setting up a budget. Analyzing expenses is the first step in the budget process, analyzing things like grocery bills, gas, shopping and then finding parts of a customer’s expenses that can be cut back on is all part of setting up a successful budget. Once a counselor analyzes expenses, the next step would be taking a peek at their income and find ways to maximize the funds that they have to work with.
Living on a budget is an important step in a customer’s journey out of debt. A certified credit counselor must be prepared to help a customer set up a budget, and a lot of times it’s just tightening up the budget with the small purchases, things like coffee, going out to eat, or small expenditures can add up and must be reined in.