A call from a debt collector especially when you are already undergoing financial stress can leave you depressed. Executives hired by a debt collector are trained to use whatever tactics they can to get the money back. They will call you and ask sharp questions to lead you into a feeling of embarrassment and misery. If you manage to persist and ask questions back to the executive, he will give a brief answer and maintain the call control. Debt collectors focus on various aspects such as developing anxiety by threatening about litigation and financial washout, providing various offers of assistance; humiliating by reviewing financial accounts, etc. to get their money back. They do this by asking a number of different questions in different ways. Well, the first reaction to such a call is immediate shift to arrogance and abuse, but you must control these reactions. Instead, be confident and professional. Asking questions is the key that a debt collectorâ??s executive uses to gain call control and you can do the same. Hereâ??s the process: the debt collectorâ??s executive will start by giving his introduction and company name, and follow up with a question. You have to pause here and ask for the executiveâ??s name again. Tell the executive to spell that out for you. After you have the information, ask for the company name and tell the executive to spell that out as well. By this time, an inexperienced executive is most likely to become anxious. Now, focus on ending the call as early as possible. Ask them about the outstanding debts, the original creditor and contact information. When the executive discloses this information, say that you will verify the facts and get back to the company as soon as possible and hang up. The debt collectorâ??s executive will note down your information and move to the next person. This way you will stick to the norms, refrain from abuse and handle the call professionally. If you have any further questions, please post them in the comments section below.
Questions? Did you get that from my links page? Its all there plus audio recordings of actual phone calls with debt collectors. One of them featured in my links page about debt collection phone calls even got almost all the questions answered until he was asked for his social security number and then he got all flustered and wouldn't give out that information. Poor guy just couldn't understand why a debtor wanted his social security information. Actually there are a large number of videos and recordings of consumers dealing with debt collectors in various ways. Many are on youtube. Some of them are by Robert Paisola from Sandy, Utah. Paisola posted here several years ago then wasn't heard from again for about 2 years or so when he popped up again as a debt collector turned consumer advocate. If you google his name you will learn why he disappeared for a while. In one of his videos where he attempts to strut his stuff he got a 3 way conversation going between a lady, himself and a debt collector who promptly told the consumer that her company don't deal with the likes of Mr. Paisola. He got a bit upset about that. (LOL). There are a great many videos and audio recordings of that nature on the net and they aren't hard to find. Some are just plain funny and others give great insights about how various consumers have handled abusive debt collectors on the phone. Thanks for your informative post. Effective means of dealing with debt collectors on the phone is a topic that needs to be brought up from time to time.
If you are dealing with the OC's collections department, they are not going to use threats or embarrassment to collect. I work for a MAJOR credit card company in their call center and we train our representatives to identify the reason someone is unable to pay. It could be as simple as they don't understand their statements or how to pay, or as complex as multiple debts, job loss, income reduction. Either way, we train them to find a resolution so that the account holder's issues are resolved and steady payments can continue. <BR><BR>It does us and the client NO GOOD to create a hostile relationship and allow the balance to charge off. We would rather put you on a program that reduces payments and APR than rack up finance charges and late fees and then sell it to a third party. We lose when we sell.
Yes, and all lenders of almost any type lose when they sell to a 3rd party. Yet it appears that lenders who take the position your company takes are seemingly quite rare. Most seem to take the position that they get somewhere by calling numerous times a day, sometimes even during the wee hours of the morning, or anything they can do to harass, annoy and irritate the consumer to the max. All in the hope that such bedevilment will cause the consumer to pay up just to get some relief from the constant hounding. In some states there is nothing that a consumer faced with such non-stop hounding can do but in others the creditor can be brought to justice in state court. Be that as it may, most consumers simply do not know the law or how to make it work in their favor and even if they do know that the treatment they are receiving they will do nothing about it because they fear the court system. It is nice to hear that there are at least some companies who attempt to treat the consumer with respect and civility while attempting to collect what is owed to them. Thanks for your informative post.
Wish I could agree - one of the worst OCs I've dealt with was Neiman Marcus. I owed them less than $800, but they were the only creditor who called relatives after 60 days late! I finally called and offered a settlement of 75% to shut them up. A nice woman told me to send it over in writing and they would accept it. I was then told that I had to send payment before they would send me anything in writing and that I could only pay via direct debit from my bank acct. - they refused a money order! I told a manager that getting a settlement in writing was common practice and that I did not have a bank acct. so could only send a money order, and she wouldn't budge one bit. They got zero, nothing, nada from me. So, not all OC's are nice, Neiman Marcus was absolutely horrible.
Great. So I guess the lesson is "Buy $900 worth of stuff from Neiman Marcus. Decide not to pay. Laugh about it later." Responsibility people. Ever heard of it? If you can't afford to put down 9 $100 bills, then you can't afford to charge $900 at Neiman Marcus. Face it. You are not rich.
My best guess is that the lesson to be learned is don't use credit cards in the first place. They are expensive. Of course, they can be almost a necessity in some situations. My second guess is don't judge others until you have walked a mile in their shoes. Most likely the third lesson is that we should all heed the lesson of Jesus when he said neither a lender nor a borrower be. That simple lesson would keep every body out of problems, now wouldn't it? Another lesson you might do well to learn also came from Jesus when he said [Never judge others lest you be judged yourself. So please define the word rich for us. In a world where there are a great many billionaires even a millionaire isn't considered rich anymore. Rich is a relative thing. I am loved so therefore I am rich. Keep on with your judgmental posts and you won't even be that rich.
yes i think you did hear a bible get thumped.and i respect the man that quoted the verse.we could all learn a lesson from the bible.
I guess you haven't ever been sick and lost everything including your income.I'm rich because i had friends and family help me out and give us love,no money just a friend in our darkest hour.Being rich or poor will not teach you compassion,our understanding.
You were so sick you had to go to Nieman Marcus. Listen, I'm judging because our economy is in the crapper due to this irresponsible attitude about money. I suffer when you make dumb choices. And then you have the nerve to BRAG about them. Pay your bills. And cap1, keep your religion out of my face, thank you very much. Go worship Santa Claus on your own time. This is about money. Not your personal rituals.
You need to learn what has actually caused our economy to get dumped into the crapper. It wasn't due to people not paying their debts at all. That had nothing to do with it. What caused our economy to go to pot was a combination of several things that the American people had no control over whatever. It actually started back in the 1970s when Levi Strauss and Co. was allowed to move it's production facilities to Mexico. They started the NAFTA movement and our idiot politicians thought that was a great idea. By 1980 American factories were going south in droves and you could drive through the Maquilladora section of Juarez, Mexico and other border cities and it looked like the Who's Who of American corporations. But they soon had a big problem because the Mexicans wouldn't work for the pittance they paid for labor. Many of them worked 10 and 12 hours a day 6 days a week for as little as $22.50 a week. The American factories stayed there for only about 10 years and then started their move to South America and the Asian countries where people would work for even less than that. The loss of Levi Strauss & Co. dealt a major blow to the El Paso economy. Unemployment was rampant and other businesses were failing too. Then fast forward to 1990 or thereabouts. The banks and the real estate people figured out how to monetize the mortgage industry by selling their notes to investors world wide through the Securities and Exchange markets. It wasn't long before they also figured out how to keep track of all their notes and mortgages through a corporation known as MERS (Mortgage Electronic Registry Systems) and make them the assignees of all their notes. That way they could avoid paying taxes each time they sold a note. Saved them untold billions of dollars which the state and county governments rightfully had coming to them. They also figured out how to sell homes they didn't own and notes they didn't have buyers for at the time they sold them to the investors and an insurance company named AIG to guarantee the loans. In order to fill those empty houses and put an actual person in them they illegally inflated the values of the homes by using appraisers who would appraise the home for whatever they wanted it to be appraised for and then sold it to people who didn't have the money and couldn't possibly qualify had their incomes been truthfully stated. When they defaulted another sucker was skillfully inserted into the foreclosed home. Everybody thought the good times would never end and home prices would always escalate. We would never have another depression. Government kept on rolling the presses and printing more and more money, financing their wars and overburdensome public assistance programs by selling trillions of dollars worth of government securities to other nations and foreign investors. When all of that is considered it is no wonder we are losing half a million jobs a month. When that many people lose their jobs, their source of income and have to be supported by government it is small wonder that our economy is in the crapper. If people had jobs and a strong economy they would not be defaulting. They could go to Nieman Marcus or anywhere else they wanted and have no problem paying their debts. That's what has caused the problem. The greed of big business and the stupidity of our elected officials. Not the average joe. No, wrong again. What I have is the nerve to tell big business to behave like the good citizens they expect us to be and and government to Pay your(it's) bills and quit thinking that they can go anywhere in the world, buy anything they want and pay for it with funny money backed by the jobs they sent elsewhere and if their creditors don't like that they can meet face to face with our army, navy, air force and marines who are mostly young, halfway educated and falsely led to believe that they are fighting and dying for their country. Give us our jobs so we can produce and earn and we will pay our bills. No problem. Wrong again. Nobody in America over the age of 3 worships Santa Claus. Yes, it is about money but more precisely the lack of it which is not our fault. And if you want me to keep my religion out of your face then keep your sanctimonious preaching out of mine.
glass,you always have the option to move on.your very bold to come here and start telling others what to do.if you dont like a topic move to the next one.when your six feet in the ground see what your money will do for you then.
Excuses excuses. Pay your bills. PS: I'm not rich. I was in the same boat: thousands of dollars in debt. I paid it off, finally. I am no longer in debt. I never again intend to use a credit card if I don't have the money in my pocket to pay for the purchase. Cap1, give me a break. The simple answer is: to make a buck, banks gave out loans to people who couldn't afford them after the rates rose. Adversely, people took out loans they could not afford because they somehow imagined they could magically afford them one day. There was lying and cheating on BOTH sides. Dumb dumb dumb. And we may not be over the edge, yet, but we are on our way. The outrageous reliance on credit cards, and the lack of responsibility in using them, is a HUGE problem in this country and will lead to its financial demise. Pay your bills. That's all it takes. If you can't afford to pay them, don't buy unneccessary things. Period.
Oh, and one more thing, cap1: it's not the creditor's fault that we bought things on a credit card that WE cannot afford. Take responsibility for your actions, people! If you borrow money, you have to pay it back. That's it.
That is quite correct. Banks gave out loans to people who couldn't afford them after the rates rose. (read that as artificially jacked up to rip people off) The fed didn't raise the rates. In fact the fed has long had a policy of steady decreases in rates but the banks rose them mercilessly anyway. They jacked up the rates then tacked on all manner of fees for nothing just to make more profits they didn't deserve to the point where government has now had to step in and pass new laws to put the brakes on. That cost government a bundle of money which hurts us even more than ever That too is correct. So why try to put the blame all on the consumers? Maybe and maybe not. Several key indicators say that indeed the economy might be turning around. That may be very temporary or it might be long term. Only time will tell. Both gold and oil are going down instead of rising right now. It sure is. And the biggest problem in the lack of responsibility department is in government and the big corporations, not the little man on the street. Yes, that is still a distinct possibility. That's it. You got the idea now go sell it to the government and the big corporations and quit trying to get attention by beating up your fellow man and berating him.
Actually, Glass the issue is a lot more complicated than you are making it out to be. Personal responsibility rhetoric is great for feeling better about yourself but for actually understanding what happened it's the equivalent of putting your hands over your ears and singing la la la la la la...I think you should look into understanding it better with regards to the repeal of the Glassâ??Steagall Act, the securitization of debt so that it could be packaged and sold on Wall St. and the general reliance on deregulation and the market to be self limiting. I guess your refusal to "accept excuses" and your tough talk feel great to you-But you really have no excuse for your ignorance about the economy in general and the effects that it has had on individual lives. Quite honestly, I don't think your capable of understanding it intellectually and scapegoating others that can not pay their bills now is intellectually disingenuous. It's nice to parrot things that others have said on fox news, but you really don't know anybody's personal situation here and to presume that it falls into some narrow righteous viewpoint is overly simple isn't it?
Glass I still stand by my post #11.Our forefathers,were against a strong central bank,and didn't want banks to have control of the country that they have now,and people should pay their bills,but sometimes they can't,and remember they paid for what they bought and then some with high interest rates.Next time the banks boo hoo lets not bail them out,instead lets buy pitchforks and run them out of town,or as they say well they can flip burgers or something,because they sent the jobs to India.So i wish you would learn its easy to say pay your bills and man up.Some people can't, its not an excuse,its a fact.
The conservative "pay your bills" and "take personal responsibility" sounds great until it's time to bail out a bank (oops, we'll just need to pay that off later, oh, and we might even make a profit!) or go to war (Can't raise taxes for that, we'll have to pay for it on credit and let our children and our children's children pay for today's war). I can't help but see just a little hipocracy. The banks are privatizing gains while socializing losses and then telling the public they are the irresponsible ones for borrowing money they couldn't afford to pay back. Yeah, right.
