It’s funny – when you owe someone money, say a creditor, they are MORE than present in your life.. The phone calls.. The fear-inducing letters from “law firms”.. The mean, bully of a collector on the phone who is doing nothing short of threatening to take your first born if you don’t give him every dime you have (or don’t have) right now…. It is disgusting.\u00a0 But, the second you request something from them – say, a very important letter stating that you have paid the account in full and the account is close, more importantly,\u00a0responsibly making note of it on your credit report – you may as well consider yourself screwed.\u00a0 They won’t want to help.\u00a0 God, I don’t even want help, I just want them to do their job.<\/p>\n
I am thrilled to say that we are no longer in a position where we have to ignore our phone.. And when we get an official looking letter in the mail, I can open it with great confidence that we either won something or that we are receiving some sort of notice that our payment was made through our online banking.. We are out of debt and well on our way to making smart financial decisions.\u00a0<\/p>\n
So, being a lady that can now answer her phone without trepidation – I started noticing a weird 800-number popping up about two weeks ago.\u00a0 I can’t explain why, but I avoided it.\u00a0 It’s like they say about addicts: once a junkie, always a junkie – right?\u00a0 Except in my case it goes a little something like: Once a single mother ex-college student who can’t pay her bills and can’t answer her phone always a… well, you get the point.\u00a0\u00a0I had this wierd feeling that it was a collection agency – even though, as far as I know I have paid off all my debts (with exception of student loans).\u00a0 But, still, I nerve-wrackingly couldn’t answer my phone – the same old fear and gut wrenching feeling came over me and I started avoiding unidentified numbers popping up on my caller ID.\u00a0 It’s nearly in my blood now.\u00a0 Then I realized how ridiculous I was being.<\/p>\n
I answered the phone.<\/p>\n
Damn if my instincts weren’t right.\u00a0 It was a “law office” (I put this in\u00a0quotations because it is really just a collection agency with one or two paralegals working in house – “Law offices” scares people into paying like you would not<\/strong> believe) telling me that I owed money on an account that I KNOW I paid off last December.\u00a0 I told them this and he said for me to find proof.\u00a0 Now, with my hectic life and my typical forgetfulness – I started to doubt myself. Well.\u00a0 Eight days later and several nasty phone conversations later I am happy to report that it is all cleared up.\u00a0 And, I am even happier to report that it was not my error but the error of the “system”.\u00a0 I paid the damn thing off and the slouch of a company that I paid it to had never noted it or closed the account. It has been shuffled around from “law firm” to “law firm” and smeared quite smugly on my credit report for the last eight month.\u00a0 Turds.<\/p>\n So, I called the mongers who were responsible – and, just for the record, they happened to be just the ones that (probably very illegally) bullied and threatened me beyond reason.\u00a0 Again, I got a ridiculously rude person who – when I tried to ask why the account was not closed and noted as paid in full since I called four times after I paid it off – hung up on me.\u00a0 I guess they didn’t need any of my money anymore so why waste their time dealing with me, right?\u00a0 I called back and, thank god, got her again and went toe to toe with her.\u00a0 You just don’t hang up a\u00a0girl.\u00a0I had to get out my exceptionally professional “if you f#!* with me I will find you and kill your dog” voice.\u00a0 I finally got some answers.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n So, I spent the morning calling every account I paid off and requested an additional letter stating my closure with them, even if I already received it. Because chances are I lost the letters first time around and, now I know, even though you think you have taken care of something it still might pop back up in your life and you NEED documentation to get your back.\u00a0 A little advice for all you people out there dealing with credit card people and collection agencies – follow up.\u00a0 I was foolish enough to think that they did their job and that I would be in the clear.\u00a0 Not true.\u00a0 At all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s funny – when you owe someone money, say a creditor, they are MORE than present in your life.. The phone calls.. The fear-inducing letters from “law firms”.. The mean, bully of a collector…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-money-management"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=442"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}