I had always had good credit until I was laid off 5 years ago. I exhausted my savings over the course of a year while waiting to go back to work. I was able to find another job, but it paid literally half and I ended up losing my home, some property and I had a $14,000-ish Citi/Sears credit card balance go into default. I am slowly getting back to where I was pre-layoff and am doing much better financially now, but I really want to be proactive about cleaning up my credit report so for employment opportunities and so we can buy a home and stop having to rent. My biggest concern is the credit card which defaulted about 4 years ago. The SOL in TN is 6 years. I called recently to ask about a settlement and was told that that was no longer possible. They said that the debt had been cancelled and I had been sent a 1099 for the full balance in January of 2013. I do not recall the 1099 and am not looking forward to amending my tax return, but it is what it is. The gentleman told me that there would be no settlement offer available, no further collection activity on the account, it would not be transferred to anyone else for collection and there would be nothing they could do to change the status on my CR. Oh, but i could mail in payments on it if I wanted. Ha! Has anyone had any experience with this sort of thing? Any ideas on how to proceed from here? I figured I'd just start trying to get it deleted from my CR, but i wanted to wait for some solid advice first.
