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Keeping the details light; let me know if you need more. I just found out that I have more credit card debt than I thought. I think it's all relatively current; only a couple accounts are closed and as far as I can tell, it's all still with the original lenders. What is my best course of action to try and make this all go away? A friend suggested that I call the companies up and see if I can't settle each line/close it for some percentage of what is actually owed on it. Is this possible to do on my own? Should I be contacting some sort of professional about it? I don't think the situation is bad enough that I need to declare bankruptcy, but it definitely throws a massive wrench in my short- and medium-term life plans here. Any advice is appreciated!
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Mar 14, 2021 22:57
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lord_daeloth posted:So is the debt definitely yours/legit? My wife's; it is now my task to unfuck her/our finances. quote:If so, yeah, couldn't hurt to offer to settle, some companies are more willing than others. Try to do everything in writing if possible. Just always lowball what you can pay. If they are willing there will be some back and forth and if you play it right, you should end up right about where you feel comfortable. How far would you lowball? 50% owed? 25%? 75%? My credit is fine, it seems. Her rating is in the dumpster, but at least one of the cards she has is listed in the "these are the good credit cards" thread, so I might just use that for monthly bills or something, and pay it off each month to work on building her credit back up. I've had a couple spots of good luck so far - some of the bills due to the city, they just went ahead and waived the (considerable) stacked-up late fees. The power company put me on a 0% interest repayment plan that seems reasonable. The largest single card put me on a low-interest repayment plan, but I may still consider trying to lowball lump-sum settle once I get everything sorted out and I have a full picture of our financial position. I'm still working my way through every single active account and making sure everything is current. I'm . . . hoping . . . for no more surprises. She said there shouldn't be, but I feel like that guarantee is about worth the CO2 used to utter it.
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Mar 15, 2021 19:05
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lord_daeloth posted:Every settlement I've made I started at half of what I could actually send them, which generally ended up being around 25% of the amount "owed" on the account. They might be a bit bleh about the offer if they are the original creditors, but it doesn't hurt to try. I also made sure to state that any offer of settlement is an offer only and not a promise to pay unless unless a written settlement agreement can be reached. Probably not strictly needed, but I always felt it was a good idea to cover all bases. Usually after a couple rounds of haggling it would wind up around 50%ish of what was owed, or right around what funds I had available. Most should jump at these offers since its way more than they'd get if they sold it off to a collection agency and saves them in attorneys fees if they were thinking about suing. Depending on how hard you push, you can probably get even better deals. For most that was it, they'd send the agreement in writing, I'd send them a cashiers check via certified mail and tada. One company, though, sent me a financial disclosure form I had to fill out with copies of my bank statements before they would agree to the amount, I just blacked out all the giant dildo and horse tranq purchases before sending the copy off and refused to fill in some of the more personal bits (like my wife's employer's contact info???). In the end they still took the agreement, so it seems like you can be a bit pushy about it, though don't take that as any sort of hard and fast advice. Good faith offers of repayment are also probably good in the event that you get taken to court, though everyone I've ever dealt with always settled before things got that far, whether collection agency or original creditor. Great advice, thanks! I'm guessing this is for accounts that are already "closed" or otherwise dead and I'm just making payments on them. The cards that I want to actually KEEP, I suspect I can't play this game with, correct? I'm not sure if it's fortunate or unfortunate that most of the cards are still active/in good standing, but the largest one by an order of magnitude is closed/on the payment plan, so we'll see what I can't do there. Once I have all my ducks in a row, I'll report back!
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Mar 15, 2021 21:13
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Big Taint posted:FWIW after defaulting on some cards, having them written off and OCs selling the debt, and going through many collectors - since they have fallen off my reports every one of those companies has given me a new card. Except AmEx. Once a year I apply for one, and they send me a letter saying I can have a new card if I pay them half what I walked away from. drat, that's ice cold hahaha.
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Mar 16, 2021 03:50
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Dik Hz posted:I mean, if you got stiffed you'd probably say the same thing.... I mean, me personally? Sure, I can be petty and vindictive. Kinda surprised that a business that sees this poo poo every day would be though lol I can't say it doesn't make SENSE; I'm just surprised they're going through the effort of tracking that a decade+ out.
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Mar 16, 2021 16:39
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lord_daeloth posted:Oh yeah, I can't see there being any way they'd accept a settlement and let you keep the line of credit. I saw in your previous message that you said you did your final settlement with a cashier's check via certified mail. What would the advantage of that be vs. just having them pull the money from my checking account online? I'm guessing it provides a paper trail or something but figured I'd ask.
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Mar 16, 2021 18:59
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Big Taint posted:They are notorious for doing their own collections rather than selling the debt off, and when I sent them a Dunning letter on a lark they sent me a fat envelope with my original signed application and every statement they ever sent me. I was impressed. AmEx doesn’t gently caress around. I looked up "Dunning Letter" but it looked like it was going the other direction from what I'm trying to do here (send them an offer to negotiate a settlement at a lower value than the account value). Do you happen to have any links lying around with how-to's or examples for this sort of thing? I've got my ducks in a row now, and it is now time for me to approach lenders hat-in-hand and see if they won't, in essence, pay me to gently caress off.
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Mar 18, 2021 15:17
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lord_daeloth posted:Yeah, just to have a paper trail mostly, but also to make sure that they get the exact amount we agreed too, nothing more, nothing less. Certified mail is so that they can't say they never got the letter/check, cashier's check is so that they don't get to see any of my checking account info. I also include a signed letter that I make a copy of stating that I've enclosed the final settlement amount agreed upon and that acceptance of said payment is agreement that the debt is settled otherwise they need to send it back, and requesting that they respond in writing as to whether or not they accept settlement of the account (they almost never send this confirmation for some reason), yadda yadda. Its probably all a bit overkill, but I didn't want to leave any room for interpretation. I've heard horror stories (in my own family even) of people just having money taken out of their account from default judgements and the like. Speaking of, if you have poo poo in collections, don't let your parents give you power of attorney or bank account access, apparently. Luckily, to my knowledge, nothing is truly in collections yet; it's all with the original creditors still. Though I'm not sure if that'll make trying to settle easier or harder. . . . well, nothing is in collections to my knowledge, anyway. It's on my to-do list to pull credit reports and make sure I'm aware of everything on there, but I've been in triage mode just getting everything current (so I can stop paying overdraft and late fees) and I'll do the full recon later.  Adulting is hard.
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Mar 20, 2021 02:20
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Since all my current outstanding debts are with original creditors, I'm gonna try calling one I guess and see if I can't verbally get to a settlement agreement (that I would then have them send the terms of it to me in writing). If this goes poorly, maybe I'll try starting the next one in writing; not sure who I would send that to though. Wish me luck, and/or tell me why I'm a dumbass! Edit: I went back and read every post from 2018 or so onward, and it seems like most of the thread experience is with debt collectors. Since one of my OCs has already put one account on a payment plan, I'm going to try for settle-for-close or settle-for-delete instead of a payment plan, but we'll see how that goes! Zarin fucked around with this message at 16:43 on Mar 22, 2021 |
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Mar 22, 2021 16:37
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Update: Attempt number one: we were transferred to collections, and began working on a settlement over the phone. The rep threw out a number, we countered with another, she said "hold on, my system is taking a moment, one sec" and then we were disconnected. Called back, told the first-line person what we were trying to do, and we were transferred to another department that was trying to put us on a payment plan. "No, no, we want to settle and close." "I can't do settlements here" "Okay, no problem, who can? We were just talking to them before we were disconnected." "Here, let me transfer you." *immediate disconnect* Third call, told the first-line person what we were trying to do, and we were transferred to what should have been the correct department. "Your account is in good standing, we can't settle" "That's not true, we were talking to someone who was walking us through the process, then we were disconnected" "We don't do settlements" "Is there a place where I can work this out in writing?" "No" "I don't believe you" *I hung up* So, now to try and find out what the process of doing this with an Original Creditor is . . . . If anyone's got ideas, let 'em rip
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Mar 23, 2021 21:44
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Big Taint posted:Keep trying until you get somebody else who has a clue/ask for a supervisor? You might also try googling and see if anyone has written about experiences negotiating settlements with that bank, they all seem to do things a little differently. Yeah. It was pretty funny, my wife is the primary accountholder and I'm in the notes as an authorized person but they REFUSED to talk to me and only her once I said I wanted to close the account. I figure I may need to do a conference call with her and just help crowdsource responses in Discord or something, because she is MUCH less comfortable dealing with this kinda poo poo than I am. Edit: Like, literally, we were on speaker and the agent asked a question, I answered, she said "I need to talk to <female name>" and my wife repeated what I said exactly. This went on for several minutes before I got annoyed and we hung up.
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Mar 24, 2021 02:14
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Backstory: I'm the guy who found out my wife opened and maxxed out some cards without telling me; I am now in charge of household finances for the rest of eternity and am working to correct this. Note: All my experiences here are in dealing with the original creditors (OC). I know nothing about dealing with collections agencies. IMPORTANT NOTE: Turns out saying "Yeah, make Zarin an authorized user to handle this on my behalf" is NOT just a note in the system; it will ALSO add that (terrible, late-payment-ridden) item to my (impeccable) credit report. BUYING A HOUSE IS HARD ENOUGH, THIS IS NOT HELPING. Anyway. Called the first card to get rid of and got sent over to collections to negotiate a settlement. In the middle of the negotiation process (we had basically arrived at a number and the person on the other end was putting it in the system) the line went dead. gently caress. Called back; "We don't do negotiations." "Yes you do." "No we don't." "Fine, let me talk to collections." Line goes dead again. Third time, got over to collections and some rude lady ended up flustering us and we hung up on her. Somehow, she took it upon herself to close the card. -_- What made us really upset was that I was the one trying to do the talking, on speakerphone; wife had already given me clearance to speak on her behalf, but the person on the other end of the line wanted to play games and was straight-up REFUSING to answer anything I said with "I'm sorry, I can only talk to the cardholder about this matter", which is what ended up causing us to hang up in frustration. Lesson learned: don't get upset, and take lots of notes. All the notes. Called back a week later. This time, I decided we were going to skip the "this person can speak on my behalf" poo poo and instead started by setting up a conference call with just my wife and I. Each of us were at our computers with Discord open, then we added the 800 number to the conference call. I kept my headset muted while wife was doing the talking and I was taking notes/feeding questions/feeding answers via Discord PMs, with the occasional finger snap that meant "mute the mic a sec so we can discuss". Worked pretty well, but I really wish she had the skills to just do this herself  Call went okay; once we hit a roadblock, we asked to be escalated to the next level of authority. That worked for a bit, but we ended up needing to escalate beyond the level of authority staffed on a Saturday afternoon, so they set up a callback for the weekday.Weekday callback rolls around, and the Authority Person on the other end finally agrees to honor the negotiation that the very first person had started to put into the system "even though she shouldn't have done that". Whatever, but sorry if I got you in trouble, original collections person  But then things got weird: "Normally I wouldn't do this at all, but you said you had funds available right now, gimme a debit card number" and we were like "uhhhhh we want it in writing" and the response was "Nope, debit card, I'll run it right now for the agreed upon amount, then someone from collections will delete the rest of the balance and you can request a zero-balance letter in 15-20 days." I was pretty sketched out by all of this but I also wanted it to be over, so I went ahead and gave the debit card info. It was a stressful couple of days, but the rest of the balance fell off the account before the week was up, so I guess they decided to keep their end of the bargain.So. One card down, several more to go.
Zarin fucked around with this message at 03:58 on Apr 13, 2021 |
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Apr 13, 2021 03:54
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vortmax posted:Never negotiate over the phone.* Yeah, I was worried that I'd hosed up. Turned out okay, though. I'm wondering if it's different because I'm dealing with the original creditors (who are, like, actual companies with customer service departments) than debt collectors (who are . . . not). Unless you think there's another way this'll come back to bite me . . . ?
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Apr 15, 2021 23:34
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lord_daeloth posted:Did they send you anything saying that the account was settled? I once had a phone company that I settled with and then later got a collections notice (for $75 lol). Gotta have that documentation. They said that after 15 days from the phone call, that I can call and request a zero-balance letter. That date is marked on the calendar and you can bet we'll be doing that. I can see on the website that the account balance was reduced to zero, but that may not be enough. I'll be sure to screenshot it all the same, however.
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Apr 16, 2021 21:14
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My buddy just found out his entire family is getting rawdogged by creditors thanks to the good folks at the Church of Scientology. Unfortunately, some accounts were opened in his name that he was not aware of until Friday when he started getting calls about it. I initially opened the call thinking it was a "help me set up a budget" but based on the scope of what he's shared with me now, I'm thinking I need to get some sort of lawyer that specializes in unfucking people's lives from that specific organization. Any tips on where the gently caress to even start? I have to imagine there are groups out there that specialize in this but a brief Google search didn't yield anything useful yet.
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Jun 25, 2023 07:53
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vortmax posted:If you or your friends know any lawyers, ask them for recommendations. I don't think a bankruptcy attorney could help with the situation, but they could probably point you in the right direction. I know a couple lawyers so I'll check with them; I don't live in Scientology Country though. As for the fraud part, I agree; it's his mom though and he's not wanting to throw her under the bus, which makes things difficult.
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Jun 25, 2023 19:37
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