I have 6 accounts in various stages of collection, totaling about $35,000 all legit. I am getting my financial life back together and found this site about 2 weeks ago. I have a few questions I could not find an answer to on the board anywhere. 1. If I pay these accounts how will it affect my credit rating at all since they account is already past due and has been listed as a collection. the only thing I can see changing is the paid in full line on the CR. it's Still there as a negative mark for another 7 years. 2. I am going to request a deletion on all of these accounts if I pay in full. Is there any legal or strong-arm tactic that I can use to get a company to go along with this? I can be just as intimidating on the phone as any CA so they don't scare me. (looking more for what not to say on the phone) or in a letter. 3. There is one debt with Nissan that I am going to probably go to court over for 10,000. This was a lease that they repo'ed because I stopped paying the lease because of fraud with their finance dept. I leased at the local office for 6.9% and the "mother" office recalculated my interest rate to 11% without telling me and paid the excise tax even after the local office told me that they would not pay it. ( I can have the excise abated due to my job) it was about 500.00 anyway what can I do to harrass them before I go to court to give me a paper trail. I am new here and would really appreciate any help. Thanks in advance.
Paying does not extend the reporting period, it will still come off 7 years from the initial default date. Best you can do is pay for deletion. If they won't delete, then paid in full is better then settled for less. You can also settle for less but ask them to report paid in full. They do do that. Usually if you have a dispute, you are expected to keep paying, but send the company a dispute and see if they resolve the problem. Then they would credit you back the difference. You should send them a request for debt validation, make sure the balances are all correct.
Settlement I disagree totally with paying these "bottom feeders". Send a letter of debt validation. When they can't provide this, threaten them with lawsuit. In all probability most of the collection are outside the statute of limitations. Check the date of last activity and find out what the SOL is in your state.
A situation like yours is like a lot of cats running for the same gap in a wooden fence at the same time ... they may all scatter because none consider it safe to try to make it through. Meantime, they'll sell the accounts to JDBs, who will wait to pounce ... when you go to buy a home, or show some other sign of getting back on your feet financially. One sign of getting back on your feet is paying someone off. Don't pay anyone who won't delete the whole tradeline. If you do pay someone who won't delete, have them put you in the driver's seat by agreeing not to update the CRAs with any info about the settlement and not to answer any disputes you may send to the CRAs. Then wait to dispute the account until all the other situations are settled or past SOL. Deletion of the TL might trigger further collection activities from some JDBs who have highly sophisticated analysis models that have a memory for what your credit looked like before and which vet current reports against old ones. They might assume that anything that got deleted was paid. It's hard to know whether anyone's gotten that sophisticated yet ... perhaps a handful of the very largest players.
