Friday, May 27, 2011

Dealing with those damn collections calls

Alright lets face it. The economy sucks and just about everyone is in debt. Statistics show that about 50% of credit cards are going into default because we simply just cant pay for them. There's no freaking jobs open and well...we spend too much. I know for a fact that I wouldn't be able to keep up with my spending habits (or drinking habits) if I didn't have my business lol. So here we go, lets talk about that skeleton in the closet that you have....
 
First off...I have to give a few disclaimers. "I am not a lawyer. I am not giving legal advice. Please consult an attorney if you have any pending litigation. Please seek legal advice if you are considering bankruptcy". Second, this is a piece for people that have unsecured debt and cannot keep up with the monthly payment because a legitimate hardship. I AM NOT telling you to stop paying for your shit people...and I would highly recommend against doing so because its a hard freaking climb to bring your score back up...trust me. Lastly, again I am not writing this as legal advice! If you owe money...and collections agencies are bugging the crap out of you, this is simply what I would do *wink* *wink*. If you choose to *do what I would do* then follow these steps precisely to make a credit restoration company's job (like mine) easier and save you a ton of money in the end.

So I'm going to tell you a little make belief story about my buddy...um Elvis. Shout out to my cousin Elf! For the people that know him, no he doesn't owe creditors money...just me...freaking asshole. Anyways so Elvis goes off to college and for the first time and is free to experience the world unfiltered. He moves out of his parents place and finds a nice little place to rent in the hood close to school because rent is cheap. Like many college kids in his same situation, Elf has a lot of new things to deal with that he hasn't ever had pay for before: rent, food, groceries, the bar. Yes...Elf has a part time job at my favorite little sandwich place La Metro (french for Subway), but he hasn't gotten the hang of budgeting yet and goes out of control with spending because evil credit card agencies keep sending him offers in the mail...and he accepts the offer to borrow money with the promise to pay them back...evil credit card agencies :-p.

Alright now here comes the interesting part of the story. Elf decides to say "F*** you credit cards"! He stops paying his monthly bill. After his first missed payment the credit card agencies start to get nervous and give him a call to see if maybe he forgot...but no answer. After 3 months of missed payments the credit card company realizes this little bastard isn't going to pay and starts calling him off the hook! The next thing they are going to do is sell his balance over to a collection company, usually a law firm, to bug him until he coughs up the money.

This collection company starts to call him non stop! They leave 2 or 3 voice messages a day because they think Elf doesn't know the rules of the Fair Debt Collections Act where they cant do that...because nobody knows their rights in this great free country right?

Elf is enjoying his life no worries because he found out of a little FREE service called Google Voice....damn I love google. Anyways, Elf signs up for google voice and uses his same number that hes been using for years. He sets his google voice to direct calls from specific numbers (like those 877 and 800 numbers) to go directly to his voice mail and they get logged.

After a few months and his credit is shot...he decides he wants to start to get serious about his finances and wants to see what he can do about his credit. So Elf goes to his extremely tall and hansom, super smart cousin "Quang" (lmao I had to do it!) for advice. Q tells Elf that he is going to need to pay off his debts owed on these cards, but what he can do is settle for less than what is owed on the cards. Since Elf has a log of times he received a voice message more then once in a day...Q has more negotiating power because that's considered a form of harassment and the company can be fined for every instance.

After some negotiation, Elf and the collection company agree to do a lump sum payment for less then half of what he originally owed. The next step he did was to go to a credit repair company to dispute the validity of how these bad remarks on his credit were reported. We will go over that in another blog.

Hope you guys learned some valuable pieces of info from this story to apply to your situation. Till next time!

PS. If your getting calls to your work number because they somehow got a hold of it. They should know that they are allowed to call once...and only once to your place of work to attempt to collect. But they aren't going to stop unless they know that you know.

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