Erasing Our Debt

About a week ago I received a notice in the mail that my account for a magazine subscription was turned over for collections. My subscription to said magazine ended about 6 months ago. I had received numerous letters in the mail that I needed to renew my subscription. Never did I think that they send this off to a company that would try to make me thing I was in big trouble.

The letter is from the National Credit Audit Corporation. Sounds professional, doesn't it? It even looks like it is a true debt collection company that is trying to collect this "debt". They go as far as to say "As we have not heard from you, we assume you agree you DO owe $16.98 for a subscription you ordered and never paid for." Well I never ordered an extension on my subscription, you idiots. Even further, they use a scare tactic to get you to pay by putting the always there statement from a debt collector.

Notice: This communication is from a debt collector. This is an attempt to collect a debt and any information obtained will be used for that purpose.

I googled National Credit Audit Corporation and found an article about it on Consumerist.com. Found out it was a scam and all I had to do was call the number on the letter to get them to stop. That was simple. But still, it ticked me off.

Now I'm off to write a nasty letter to the magazine company that forwarded my information off to this piece of crap company.

Just another lesson in the world of collections: Always research it if you don't believe you owe that money or if you've never heard of the company.

Labels: collections

I've always had this preconceived notion that big banks are not friendly or "forgiving" as small-town banks. And with most of my experiences it has been true. But that all changed this past week and it's going to help me get out of debt even quicker. Or at least I hope it will.

Thursday I received my monthly statement from my former bank for my line of credit. Instead of showing the usual regular $90 minimum payment being due, it showed that the entire $3,500 was due in full by the 25th of March. I was worried and pissy all Thursday night and most of Friday morning before I went up to the bank to talk about it.

Back story to the line of credit is that I applied for it when I thought I wanted to get out of debt in 2005. I had a theory that I was just going to roll all my debt into one big account. It even came with a 2 year maturity date. I thought it had a 3 year maturity date which is why I was confused as to why the entire debt was to be paid off now.

So I head up to the local branch and explain my situation to the first dude that came out to help me. He thought it was quite odd that a line of credit had a maturity date because the ones they give people now are basically treated like a credit card, you pay it down to a zero balance. I explained to him that it was with the bank that they took over so that's why it was probably different. He offered to see if we could refinance it. I agreed as it looked like my only hope. We submitted the application and I went on my merry way as it would take a couple of hours to find out. I knew without a doubt I would be denied as my credit utilization is very high. He called me back within 20 minutes to tell me I was denied and gave me the number to personal loans to see what could be done because basically it would just go to collections.

Long story short, I talked to 4 people for 14 minutes telling the same story over and over until finally I got transferred to the right person that was very helpful and said well I'm sure my manager can just provide an override for this and we can approve the refinance. I was very relieved.

Later at work I received a call from the guy at the branch to tell me the latest news that they were willing to work with me as long as they could get a firm commitment to pay this off and they would need some type of down payment. I had some extra cash in my emergency fund that was over $1000 so I put in for a transfer to take place so I could make about a 20% down payment. I plan on getting this paid off ASAP as was the original plan as this is the only credit I have that is over 10% on interest. Now this just provides extra "incentive" to get it done now.

Moral of the story: If you're going to be going to collections, it never hurts to explain your situation to them just to see if there is absolutely anything that can be done. I've always read articles about doing that but never thought it would actually matter. But apparently it does.

Labels: collections, debt