Offer your thoughts or opinion on the input financial query or topic using your financial background.

What's The Best Way To Pay Off My Collections?
If you can pay it then there's no need to involve a credit counselor.  After all, their main role when you use them is to negotiate payments with creditors so you can pay off your debts.  In this case you have the funds to pay, so why make it any more complicated than it needs to be? To be honest, a 597 score is going to make it tough for you to find auto financing.  Whatever options you find, they'll charge pretty steep interest rates and have high payments because they'll keep you on as short a payment term as your finances will allow.  I would strongly suggest that you work on improving your score for awhile before trying to buy a car.  If you can, buy a car for cash.  You might not get much, but it will solve your transportation problem while you work on resolving your credit issues. Using a credit counselor won't have any impact on your credit score as far as the debts are concerned.  What will make a difference is not having them show as open collections, which is pretty bad.  You'll still take a hit for having gone to collections in the first place, but paying them off will mitigate at least some of the effect. I hope this helps. Good luck!