guys.. very wierd. i have not paid a well known card company who is still very much in existance..i owe 6k on 2 cards and have'nt paid in almost 2 years. i just checked all 3 credit reports and not only don't those accounts show up anywhere,they also don't show up anywhere in the collections portion of my report. is this a freak occurrance? p.s. i did'nt pay because i was broke. plain and simple.
Yeah that happened to me once when I was 20. I bought a $3,500 TV set at a now bankrupt electronics store (The Good Guys it was called) I never made a payment and they never came after me (it was one of those 12 months no interest no payment until the next year deals) . A year or so later I declared bankruptcy and thought I better send a bankruptcy letter to them too. So I mailed the letter and it got returned to me. When I tried to locate them, I kept getting the same address to send the letter to. Sent it again and again it came back as undeliverable or something like that. I ignored it and just decided...well I'll just put them in the bankruptcy and they wont know about it...if they come after me later, I will just show them the returned letter to say I tried to contact them. They never tried to contact me and never messed with my credit report. As far as they know, I never declared bankruptcy (since they never got the BK letter) On another note, Pacific bell had a collection against me and I ended up paying it 3 times because everytime I paid it, I didnt keep my reciept to show them I paid it. Another one is a debt with college. They sent a letter to a collection agent saying I owed them $600. I didnt. I talked to collections and told them the story about how I dont owe it and they just sold the debt to someone else that put it on my credit report. I had to explain the story again, but they wouldnt take it off my report and refused to let it go. Then I went straight to the credit bureaus, wrote all my letters and got it off my credit report. Now here it is 4 years later and I just got a letter in January and apparently another collection agency has it now. Doesnt bother them...they buy and sell this debt for anywhere from 2 to 10 cents on the dollar and go from collection agency to collection agency. If one agency cant collect debts, they sell it to another one and if that one cant collect they sell it to another one. Sometimes they sell debts that were already paid too. (Which is why I had to pay Pac-bel 3 times) I found this out when I looked into getting into the debt collection business.
Will credit card companies still settle. 15k in the whole on a C card. Currently on a (payment plan) making minimum payments. Already stopped paying for 3 months and the phone is ringing off the hook, they want their money and are saying it's getting turned over to collections now. What happens after collections? Will a credit card company settle for 50-60% of the total balance?
Once it's in collections never pay a cent. It doesn't do you any good... BK is very bad on your record, just change address if possible and inform them that the harassing calls are illegal unless you live in some shithole of a state where it's legal.. give it 3-4 years and your credit rating will be above average... then don't get any cards, ever again. Use a prepaid Visa and have all the convenience of a card and none of the hassles...
its been almost 2 years since my wife made a payment and its gone through many collection agencies..why have'nt they tried bringing us to court?
They are prolly busy selling off their Real Estate portfolio from defaulted mtgs amigo. How is your credit score these days?
dunno, court might be expensive for them, much cheaper to use the threat of court.. they seem to just use the telephone harassment thingy, maybe that works best for them... I used to mess with them. I'd say, "oh wait, let me get my checkbook out" and just lay the phone down and let them kill time waiting until they hung up... The way to win big in the collections game is to record all the calls and all the numbers. You can get a modem card and turn a computer into a machine that does all that. All collectors break laws, using the phones, just all of them... you collect evidence, you sue, some judgments have been over $50,000. Of course then you have to collect and they might be experts at dodging you!