hello need some info/help

No, your life isn't screwed up for good. I would definitely recommend that you pay nothing to Rogers or any of their collection agencies. Student loan? You bet! Pay it off as soon as possible and get that behind you. R1 is a good thing and I1 or I anything is bad. Pay off student loan and you can save yourself a lot of grief and expense later down the line but paying a debt collector isn't going to help your rating even one little bit.

 

What is your score now?

Why shouldn't you pay them? Because if you pay them they put a listing on the report as paid collection and that will drop your score even more. On the other hand, the older the listing gets the less impact it has on your credit score.

 

Morally speaking, yes it is a good thing that you are paying it back. But there are always at least two sides to every coin. It is no different when it comes to money and credit. When the lender lends you money morality don't enter into the equation. It is strictly a business decision. Morality only becomes an issue when you fail to live up to your obligations. Then they want to make it both a moral and a business decision. Morality is often used to leverage the debtor into paying. Shame on you for not paying your just debts they say. Regardless of their shame-on-yous and your moral beliefs, it is and should remain a business decision. Paying it is either good business or it isn't and that can change at any given time.

It is a well proven fact that first of all debt collectors seldom if ever give receipts for the payment of money. Another well proven fact is that in most cases debt collectors will report that you have paid the debt to the credit bureaus. While that report says you paid the debt the recent collection activity lowers one's credit score. From the viewpoint of future lenders you had to be forced to pay up by a debt collector and that isn't good at all.

So you can fairly well count on the fact that if your decision is based on morality issues you will wake up some day and wish you had used business thinking instead.

There are ways to pay them and force them to remove their listings from your reports or wish they had done so thereby satisfying both the moral obligation to pay your debts and getting your credit cleaned up at the same time. I may have the instructions on how to do that in my links pages and again maybe I haven't got that put up yet. I have so much there that I simply don't remember. You can search through them and let me know if it isn't there and if not I'll be sure to get the instructions up as quickly as possible.

 

Although you haven't given us enough information to make a definite decision it sounds to me like this debt is more than 2 years old and if that is true you don't even owe the debt anymore. Paying it won't get it off your credit report and so I see absolutely no justification for paying, either moral or otherwise. Or is it that you are afraid they might sue you for the debt?
As you may well realize, they could sue you at any time for the debt, even 10 or 20 years from now. If that happens and you fail to respond to the complaint properly then a judgment could be entered against you by the court and you would then owe the debt regardless of any other factor and the fact of a judgment against you would start the 7 year clock all over again if it were picked up by the credit bureaus which would most likely happen. If the thought that such a thing might happen then it might scare you into paying to prevent that scary possibility no matter how unlikely it is for things to go that way.

On the other hand, if I were to be even contacted by a debt collector or attorney I would definitely tell them that I refuse to pay. I'd even be only too happy to put that in writing and send it to them certified mail return receipt requested. Then I'd sit back and hope and pray that they sue me. But then, that would be my way of doing business if I owed a cellphone bill more than 2 years old. I am well aware that you and many others may or may not agree with my way of doing business but in the final analysis when such a difference in opinions occur, each of us has our own opinions and are entitled to them.

But now that we have a bit more information available through your most recent post I am still left wondering why you would consider paying them when the following conditions exist:
(1) Paying the debt will not improve your credit score.
(2) Paying them will be most likely to worsen your credit score
(3) You have no legal obligation to pay a cellphone bill more than 2 years old.

Those are the reasons you should not pay. The reasons to pay are as follows:
(1). You are morally bound to pay your debts.
(2). You want to do what any average person would consider to be the right thing to do.
(3). You are almost scared out of your wits about what they might do to you if you don't pay.

So now the ball is in your court. What will you decide to do? It is all up to you.

 

Paying it will close the account so that no one else can collect on it. Of course that doesn't mean someone won't try, somewhere down the line. So be sure to get the terms in writing that this will settle the account in full. It's not unheard of for this "500 will pay it off" agreement to get lost and have another collector call to thank you for the $500 you sent and ask when you plan to send the rest... (the balance, of course, will have grown over time).

OTOH, paying it off won't change the fact that you have a collection on your record. The only difference is that it will show as a "paid collection." Contrary to some information, a paid collection is as damaging to your score as an unpaid collection. The only difference is that an underwriter might give it less weight when they manually review a loan application.

If you leave it alone, unpaid, it will come off next year. If you do the right thing and pay it, it could be on for another 7 years, especially if you are making payments. When you make payments, some CAs will consider that a new collection account and a new loan agreement (i.e. they are lending you the money while you make the payments) and restart the clock based on that. Of course, they'll never tell you this unless you press them.

Remember that no good deed goes unpunished when it comes to collection accounts.

 

So you are a Canadian and didn't tell us that? We have been giving you suggestions based on American law and that is not applicable in Canada. Maybe some of what we told you is applicable but the question is which has been valid advice and which has not. Canadian law is different than American law and when it comes to consumer law at least Canadian law differs from province to province. What applies in one province may not apply in another province. You can use what we have told you and use that as a starting point to research Canadian law to see if it is the same in Canadian law or not but if you fail to do your research you could end up in serious trouble following our American advice. In some provinces the laws are much more consumer friendly than in others. To make matters worse only a couple of provinces have all their consumer law on the internet so you may have to go to a local law library to do your research.

 

I certainly wish you luck in finding a Canadian forum but I can tell you that I have searched high and low for one or more of them and have never ran into one. There is one forum that has a sub forum that discusses Canadian student loan debt but that seems to be all they are interested in talking about. If you do run into a good Canadian forum I'd sure appreciate hearing about it.

 

The 09 simply is lingo for the account being charged off but not paid and that is industry standard. The student loan that shows zero balance but you receiving letters from collection agencies is an easy explanation. When a company sells an account to collections usually reported on your report is that the account is TRL transfered to another lender but shows a zero balance since you no longer owe that company once they sell the account.