court?

Are you dealing with WAMU? Are they still sending you statements? Is your balance even going down, or are you just paying late fees?

 

I suppose they could, but what would they hope to gain over their current position? They might get a judgement, but if you have no other assets to attach, they might be limited to what they could garnish on your wages, and there is probably a cap on that.

As it is, every payment resets SOL, so they are not giving up any future right to sue. You could pay this for the rest of your life, and as long as you are keeping up with their fees and interest, they are probably doing better than if they sued, and rang up some attorney's fees or split the amount with one. If your conditions improve, they might later press for full payment. On the other hand, they could, by suing, tip you toward filing for bankruptcy, which would then erase the debt.

The above is assuming that on pulling your credit, you give the appearance of not being worth pursuing in court. They might not look at it this way, and they might still sell the debt, in which case the buyer might view things differently.

It sounds like the ball is in their court, anyway, if that is all you can afford to pay.

 

You might even come out ahead if they sued and obtained a judgement, since that would convert your existing obligation with high interest and fees, to an obligation to pay the judgement, with only statutory interest acruing, at typically around 10% APR, depending on your state.


See, for example, this case:
http://www.richardwestattorney.com/did.html

 

Are the phone calls from WAMU, or a CA?

What do they say when you tell them you are paying them what you can?

 

Checks by phone are a recipe for problems. Regardless of the law, and whatever a CA may say, once you authorize one check by phone, there are CAs that will take that same information and run thru other alleged phone checks whether you have authorized them or not. Or if you authorize payments on certain dates when you expect to have funds, they will run debits thru ahead of those dates, or all at once, to make their monthly numbers.

It creates havoc with your bank account, bounces other checks resulting in NSF charges and bad check and late fees from your other creditors, screws up your relationship with your current bank when you have enough credit problems, etc. Your bank may not even support reversal of unauthorized debits if you have authorized others in the past. It may also leave you with a poorer audit trail of your payments compared to using actual checks, so that if the creditor fails to correctly credit your payments, you may end up repaying amounts you have already paid if you cannot prove you actually made those payments.

There is no legitimate reason for you to want to do it.


Are you currently paying WAMU directly?

So far you have not been sued. If the debt is in fact still owned by WAMU, that would probably be their decision, not the CA's.

If you can make a larger payment to get the balance down faster, do so. Make sure you get statements after each payment showing that it has been properly credited.

You might also try calling WAMU directly and see if you can work out a payment plan, perhaps at a lower interest rate, or lower minimum payment to stop accumulation of late fees. The CA probably has no interest in helping you do this, since it takes them out of the picture, but the OC might have an interest in an agreement that could result in more likely recovery of their money without the overhead of the CA's cut. You may even have a value to the OC as a future customer, something the CA places no value on.

 

I can't really say for sure. I can tell you something that happened to me. We had a personal loan (furniture) that was reaffirmed after bankruptcy. After paying a year I got behind by 3 weeks, yep less than a month. Sent in my payment and they returned it saying it was late and they now want the full balance or none. Balance was $1500. Everyone told me not to worry they wouldn't do anything. Well within 2 months they took us to court. Stupid me I was scared and stupid, didn't show up so they got a judgement against us. All for $1500 and I wasn't even a month behind. The company acted fast too and attempted to garnish our bank accounts, however they couldn't because we were received food/medical assistance at the time.

So yes anything can happen!

 

Suing you takes someone deciding to do it. They have a lot of accounts, and with WAMU's purchase of the Providian CC operations, probably a lot of non-performing accounts, considering that Providian was pursuing the sub-prime market before the last recession hit. There is already some indication that WAMU sold off a bunch of the non-performing accounts they acquired with their purchase of Providian.

They don't have to, and probably can't, sue on everything at once. If they do sue, they get to pay an attorney, either a portion of what they collect, or some expenses whether you pay more or not. They may have other better candidates for using resources to collect on. On that scale, what would you do in their shoes?

You may feel like you are skating on thin ice, but you are dealing with this as best you can.

The one thing that might shift their current apparent tolerance is if they decided they had too many non-performing accounts on the books, and they wanted to just sell off a bunch and take the loss (which they have already done for accounting purposes when they charged it off), to make their financial statements look less risky.

 

Personal loan with what company, at what rate, that went late in what year?

Consumer loans for things like furniture are a different business than revolving credit card accounts. Those companies that make them know that they don't want to be the last to try to collect, from customers many of whom have marginal credit, and they set up their business and collection policies accordingly.

Revolving accounts may have penalties for late payments, such as late fees, or jacking interest rates, that may compensate the lender or retain some value in the account for later sale.

 

It was a small bank the furniture company went through (progrowth). Interesting, I didn't know the collection practices were so different. It totally shocked me when they did that to us. So now I always expect the unexpected. We filed BR in 2002, loan was late in Sept 2003, court date was Jan 2004.

Now we have 3 dings on our credit report because of 1 setback. 1-progrowth charge off, 1-Judgement and 1-collection agency trying to collect on the judgement now.

 

And the furniture company probably got a kickback up front for financing you with them.

What interest rate was it, and were there any up front fees, or "insurance" added to principal?

 

The loan was actually interest free for 6 months. That was our intention until finances changed drastically after 4 months. So when the int rate kicked in it was 19%. No up front fees, no down payment even. And no insurance. There is a clause in the contract that states it must be insured. I don't remember giving them a copy of our homeowners insurance though. And nothing in there that lists $$ directly for ins.

Like I said we were stupid, really embarrassed, small town, knew everyone kinda thing. I should have went to court and told the judge they could have the furniture back.

I know the insurance thing. Had a car catch on fire and bank tried to charge us for the loan balance. I found out we were paying "loan ins" with every payment. The bank tried to say that was for their protection. Umm yep and you are getting paid for it but from the ins co not me. So that loan was taken care of (15 years ago not sure if that is even legal anymore to add ins in like that).

 

Just looking at what we can all learn. The furniture loan itself looks reasonable straight, if you can't get better rates, although they may still have gotten a kickback to send their business there.

You may have been lucky you did not send the furniture back. It would probably have been sold or auctioned for next to nothing, and with sales fees subtracted, made no dent in your loan payoff.

Although it didn't happen in this case, as you saw with your car, it is not uncommon to sell and tack on "insurance" products to loans, but still try to weasel out of paying off. You are lucky you got what you paid for, but that was not for their lack of trying.