Timberline FinancialReviews of timberlinefinancial.com

We have been enrolled in the program for two years. To date, only 8% of our accounts have been settled. There are still outstanding accounts that were promised to be settled 6-9 months into entering the program. I have called several times to stress the urgency of getting the remaining accounts settled, however, the remaining accounts still have no resolution. I keep getting the same answer every time I contact Timberline. Two of our accounts have gone into litigation, one due to a Timberline personnel error. When we began the program, they explained that our accounts would be settled 6 to 9 months into the program. Now, 24 months later, there are still several outstanding accounts that are not being negotiated. So far this has been a miserable experience that I would not recommend to anyone.

I’m correcting my review of November 2018. Victor Vegas was the so called “Financial Consultant” was nothing but a con artist. He assured me to contact him with any questions or problems “may” encounter. IN all fairness, Mr. Vega did tell me this would affect my credit score, not blow the HELL out of it! After following the instructions to stop paying the creditors I was enrolling in their program and telling them when they called to tell them that I was working with a Financial Counselor and to contact them. When I was informed that they would not contact them I would have to have them contact the creditors. After receiving numerous calls and began to get collection notices, which I e-mailed to Mr. Vega. I never heard from him. I left several messages for Mr. Vega with none being returned, I finally found out he was no longer there and I only needed to talk with customer service. After receiving a notification A default was filed against me, as instructed to email the paperwork to them. I emailed it to their customer service department. I received a response the we’re going to assign it to their legal department. Believing that they were handling it, I didn’t worry. BIG mistake. I received a notice of A default Judgement. I called and was informed it was Never sent to their legal representative (Amerit) and was told to send both the original summons and judgement to them. I sent everything to Amerlit, customer service and someone that was supposedly a supervisor. I still never heard anything from them. After receiving a Summons for another creditor, I just decided to Take out a Home Equity loan a pay everything off myself. they did manage to negotiate a payoff for 2 out of 6 of the creditors I signed up for. After carefully looking at the monthly statements, I found they were only negotiating with a creditor after their was enough money for them to also get paid. After getting approved for the Home Equity loan I contacted Timberline, Crossroads Financial, their arm handling all the inflows and outflows of my escrow account, and Amerlit and informed them I was discontinuing their program. I was asked why,nobody seemed to care, returned the balance in my escrow account, and never contacted me to see if there was anything they could do. They were able to negotiate a payment plan on the full amount of the account that had the Judgement entered. There would be a balance reduction for a one time payment. I was able to do the one time payment with funds from the Equity loan . I wish there were negative stars, theirs would be a 5. PLEASE DO NOT USE THIS COMPANY!!!!!!

I have had 4 conversations with 4 different people about trying to get my money back from the program. Each time, I was told basically the same story: that a task had been created to "graduate me from the program, and it would take about 2-4 weeks to be executed." Each time I called back, it appeared that the person I was talking to had no record of this task being created. I have asked to get email confirmation that the process had been started, and each time I'm told that isn't possible, "for my own protection." I have asked to speak with a supervisor, and after waiting on hold for about half an hour, I was told that she had to run out at that very moment and wouldn't be able to speak with me. The promise I was given was that she would call me back at some time tomorrow to help deal with the situation. When I asked what number I could expect the call to be coming from - I now have to screen my calls since the majority of the calls I receive are from debt collectors due to following the advise of your company - I couldn't get a straight answer. The claim was that the person I was talking to does not know the extension of her direct supervisor, even after putting me on hold for a few minutes to look for it.What makes me the most nervous is that this review will be read by the people at Timberline Financial as a positive review of the customer service rep I spoke with. Since I have spoken to 4 different reps in the course of the last 6 weeks, and been given the exact same promises each time, only to have the next person I speak with have no record of such promises, it is my fear that the policy is to simply say what the customer wants to hear to get them off the phone the quickest. I hope that if I call back enough, eventually I will talk with someone who is bad enough at their job that they might accidentally be able to help me.

I have been promised an estimate to complete on multiple different occasions by multiple different deadlines. I have been promised several call backs. I have not received any of this. Each time I call it's a new excuse as to what happened or why I don't have it. If I could rate this a zero star I would have.

And the lack of communication continues. I have been waiting over two weeks for someone to contact me about my account and yet still nothing. I received an email stating they were sorry they could not contact me during the times I had offered to talk (Tuesday or Thursday between 3:30 pm and 5:30 pm). Those times are well within business hours, yet they were unable to contact me during that time. I gave them additional days and times and STILL no one called. I did receive a corrected Letter of Good Standing, but it left off the account that is currently attempting to take me to court. I will be filing a complaint with the Better Business Board.

I do not recommend it for anyone, bad service

I read bad reviews on here and two other websites so figured it was better to get out while we could and handle it ourselves. Thank goodness we were only two months into program. Contract we signed clearly stated all we had to do to cancel at any time was to give them a written note which we did in an email to our rep Eric. He said he would start the process but we needed to call customer service. So we did and they had no clue why we were calling. That was on Monday. On Thurs, I get an email from escalations that our account is not cancelled yet until they talk to us. I call customer service and still get the run around but he says the account is cancelled and we will see our refund in 7-10 bus days. I told him the contract clearly states 7 bus days not 10. He says they are running behind as they service tons of people. Then don't put 7 business days in legal document. Will update if we got refund in 7 bus days.

After promising us the moon, sun and stars to get us signed up, our experience with Timberline has been extremely disappointing. In fact, I fear our credit has been totally and completely screwed and that we may end up with garnished wages and possibly filing for bankruptcy. They are taking our automatic drafts, giving us the run-around regarding talking with particular creditors, promising to make payments to cards and not doing so. At this point, if I could give them zero stars I would. Whoever's running this company doesn't know what the HELL they are doing, unless what they are doing is deliberately taking people's money, not using it to pay off their debts as promised, and driving them into bankruptcy. DO NOT USE THIS COMPANY! Update #1: Sure enough, due to the fact that this horrible company has been taking our money for two years and failing to send that money on to at least one of our creditors for the past 6 months, we are now in litigation with three creditors and are having our wages garnished to pay one of them. In addition, our credit rating - which was previously in the high 700's and which we were assured by Timberline would take no more than a slight dip - has dropped over 200 points. And for the privilege of having our wages garnished and our credit rating ruined, and possibly of being driven to bankruptcy, we've only had to pay Timberline almost $4000 in fees over the past 2 years. Update #2: On September 13 Timberline commented here that they were sorry I'd had a bad experience and that their 'escalated client team' would be in touch to arrange a discussion. It's now the 24th and I've heard nothing from them.