Monthly Archives: January 2012
Don’t Put Up With Collection Agency Abuse
If there’s one thing people with bad credit have to deal with, it’s definitely debt collection agencies. And let’s face it — they call a lot. They’ll call all day and all night if that’s what it takes. They can actually call quite a few times, especially if they don’t make actual contact with you (and just with your voicemail). They have computer systems that will do nothing but call everyone over and over again, whether you are actually liable for the debt or not. And since people as young as 18 are becoming debt collectors, you can’t just assume that the debt collector you speak to will necessarily have the training and understanding of the law that you do. So you might get some really aggressive debt collectors trying to tell you that if you don’t pay today, they’ll sue you.
You don’t have to put up with collection agency abuse. Yes, you are going to have to pay your debts, but you are a person and that means that you deserve respect. So you need to think about how to fight collection agency abuse.
First and foremost, you need to try to go with getting a limited contact order placed in. Some refer to this as a cease and desist, but you don’t want to cut off all contact. This will only make the collection agency feel like they have to sue you in order to get your attention again. What you want to actually do is limit contact to letters only. Collection agencies hate this because it means that you have a paper trail and they have a paper trail. Well, they always have a paper trail but you have to make sure that you have an even playing field.
When you write letters to the credit collection agency, you need to make sure that you have multiple copies. No, one copy isn’t enough. What if that one copy gets lost? You need to protect that copy like you would protect your own life, if not more so. It’s time to really make sure that you focus on the bigger picture here — don’t just let them bulldoze you.
You also don’t just want to lick a stamp and send it in — you want to pay for Certified Mail, with a return receipt requested. This will let you know exactly when they receive your correspondence. Since many deadlines are 30 days, you want to give them time starting when they actually receive your correspondence, not when you mail it. Transit times can definitely take a while. So it’s better to make sure that you can know accurately when they need to act.
We’ll cover the Fair Credit Reporting Act, the real law that you need to read. Since it’s lengthy, we’ll break it down for you. Stay tuned!
Hard and Soft Inquiries – Getting the Inside Angle!
There are so many terms that go into keeping and maintaining good credit that it can really be hard to stay focused on the end goal: getting out of debt at all costs. One set of terms that comes up often is hard and soft inquiries. If you’re not in the know, you might be confused at what they are and more importantly, which one can hurt you and which one cannot.
Soft inquiries are not going to hurt your credit report at all. Inquiries are simply checks into your credit report. However, hard inquiries are the type that are initiated by other companies that are trying to assess whether or not they’re going to grant you a financial product of some kind. It could be insurance or credit cards or even a home loan. Either way, these are inquiries that tend to affect your score.
Soft inquiries come into play when someone wants to check your credit on your behalf, like a credit score monitoring service. Your employer checking in your credit is more or less going to be a soft inquiry as well. They want to make sure that you are not a financial risk to them. They feel that the lower your credit score is, the more likely it is that you could be tempted into either selling corporate secrets or otherwise damaging the company in some fashion.
Soft inquiries also happen when you get pre-approved for a loan or a credit card offer. These inquiries will never hurt you score — ever.
The hard inquiries where lenders are looking to figure out whether or not they want to extend credit to you are the ones that hurt your score. However, it’s important to remember that these inquiries only hurt your score a little bit. If you really want to shop around for an auto loan, it’s better to do that than worry about losing a few points.
The inquiries will fall off your credit report after two years, but their impact is lessened after 6 months or so have passed.
You also don’t have to feel like you won’t ever be able to find out if a company is going to do a hard inquiry (hard pull) or soft inquiry (soft pull). They will tell you if you ask, because it’s a common question that gets asked. There are other consumer sites that try to build databases of how companies handle this type of processing.
Mortgages tend to always be hard pulls, as well as student and auto loans. Personal bank loans will also tend to be hard inquiries. Car rentals can go either way — which is why it’s very important to ask them up front if itís going to be an issue.
If you already have credit monitoring set up, you might do some inquiries and then see how it really affects your score. The impact could be a lot less than you think!
