With near everyone complaining about credit card bills they can no longer pay and mortgages they never should have taken out in the first place, it was just a matter of time before the debt consolidation industry took hold of the public’s imagination. Most people finally seem to understand that, after 2005 congressional legislation, Chapter 7 bankruptcy no longer promises anything to ordinary consumers beyond increasingly dear attorney fees, and, if recent studies are true, our national obsession with unsecured debt continues unabated. An article in the Wall Street Journal announced that the average household now carries a dozen credit cards among their members with a total balance approaching eighteen thousand dollars. Honestly, if anything, it seems odd that Americans did not turn to the debt consolidation approach sooner. Once debts have reached a size and number that makes their speedy resolution untenable, it just makes good sense to examine whatever alternatives now exist. However, it’s one thing to take a look at debt consolidation and quite another to jump blindly into the first program sold by a glib professional promising the world. Debt consolidation may be