Newbie with lots of questions!

Iâ??ve been reading for about a week now and finally registered cuz my head is spinning and Iâ??ve got questions! Iâ??ll give you a little background first, which I will make as brief as possible. HA! Oh, well... Iâ??ll try.

My DH and I have ordered our CRâ??s from all 3 CRAâ??s and waiting for them to come in. Meanwhile, we have a problem that we need advice on now. We are both preachers... yeah, we have problems, too! We were co-pastoring a very small church. They had gotten behind on our salary, which wasnâ??t much, but we were managing. When they started getting behind, DH got behind on his CCâ??s. I managed to stay current with mine (we maintain separate CCâ??s and bank accounts for the most part) and didnâ??t know at the time that he had gotten behind. They did pay us our back salary when we left, but the damage was done. He never caught up and didn't know how to deal with it. We were living in another state at the time, but decided to move back to where family is to take a break and hopefully get caught up on things. Yeah, right! It only got worse, but we are making progress, even if we DO have to live with DHâ??s parents to do it! And thatâ??s another story!

OK... so, hereâ??s the problem. DH had some good sales (heâ??s working retail home electronic sales right now... straight commission) and was able to settle on a couple of his CCâ??s. (Wish we had known then what we know now... might have gotten them settled for less. A lot of the balances are late and overlimit fees, anyway. Oh, well.) One day, he gets served with a lawsuit from Cap1. Had 30 days to file an answer so he did it mostly right that time... got it in writing! Only problem was, we didnâ??t know to include the removal of the tradeline as part of the settlement. Now, we are waiting to see if it is actually on his CR... probably is. We still have one more payment to make... he thinks. He needs to figure up what we have paid to make sure.

OK.. So that wasnâ??t the only problem. It still had the church we had pastored as his employer. A statement on the payment due notice they send each month said, â??In order to maintain the privilege of making monthly payments on this account, you must keep the below information current. If any information has changed, you are required to provide the revised information. Mark through inaccurate information and provide correct information to the right.â? I thought he should do what it said and tell them his current employer. Boy, was I stupid or what? We were living in our own place at the time (another long story), but moved in with his parents last January. (Yeah, heâ??s 47 and Iâ??m 50 and weâ??re living with his parents cuz weâ??re up to our eyeballs in debt!) The process server found us at home that time.

Well, after they said they would send out the paperwork for him to sign an â??agreed judgmentâ?, we got a notice of a judgment against him from the courts! He contacted the attorney. She said, yeah, we made a mistake and had the judgment vacated. Decided not to even do an agreed judgment because by that time, we were already making the payments. Allâ??s well, right? WRONG!!! (Remember, this is before I discovered CreditNet and all you wonderful people!)

A couple of months ago, the phone rings (we donâ??t have a land-line phone in our name) and his mother answers. Somebody looking for DH. Heâ??s at work, so I take the call. Turns out to be someone (attorney?) from the same law firm that has the Cap1 account. This time, he is calling about Direct Merchants. I tell him I really donâ??t know anything about the account, but that DH does intend to pay and Iâ??ll have him call. DH finally calls the guy back after I hound him for a couple of weeks to do it. He tells him that this one will have to wait until Cap1 is paid in a couple of months... this is agreeable to them. Now, we are paying more than we can afford on Cap1 because DH offered a range and they took the high end, of course. We still owe our former landlord some money (long story for another time!), so thinking he will pay off Cap1 in June with the proceeds of a major big sale (settled another account instead), we tell him we will pay him the amount we are paying on Cap1. Payments actually started in July, but now we are paying double what we really couldnâ??t afford to begin with. Ugh!

Well, it still gets worse. He gets served again... this time at work! Same attorneys! They would have had a tough time finding us if we had not told them where he worked, although they did call his parentsâ?? home before and, of course, knew at that point that they had the right phone number. :-( But whatâ??s done, is done. Now, we need to know how to proceed. I know that we need to dispute this. For one thing, the plaintiff is Colorado Capital Investments, Inc. We have no idea who that is! My question is do we go ahead and dispute? Or do we wait for the CRâ??s to arrive to see if it is on them? He was served on 9/30 and we have 35 days to give an answer, dispute, request verification, etc. The last thing we want to do is mess up and miss the deadline!

Thanks in advance for your help. This place is great! Now, if I can just get my brain to absorb all that Iâ??ve been reading! Iâ??ve been printing stuff out for DH to read on his lunch breaks, too.

 

Thanks for the encouraging words, Butch. I've read enough on here to figure out that this is going to take a while. We have made a lot of progress, thanks to DH's parents letting us camp out in their house for the past several months! We were going to pay room and board, but when I started to give them the first check, they said to put it on our bills. They've been gone a lot so we've had the house mostly to ourselves which is nice, but they are home now and probably won't be RV'ing again until spring! They are also feeling the pinch from the drops in the market as well as a bunch of unexpected expenses in the past few months, so I'm sure they would really appreciate it if we could start paying that room and board!

As for the insurance, I wouldn't know what that would be and that church closed two weeks after we left. The district did help us out with a month's pay. Unfortunately, it just didn't stretch far enough. God took care of us, but we did make some stupid decisions. I'll share some of them at some point, but it's too late tonight. Most of the problem came about with DH's CC's. I really didn't know how many he had or what the CL's were... still a little unclear until I finish sorting through everything. I'm trying to get things organized so I can keep track of what I'm doing and that's tough when a lot of it is in storage!

Anyway, I'm trying to focus on the most critical thing right now and that is the pending lawsuit. Disputing it will buy us some time to work out a strategy and as I said (I think!), we don't even know if it really is his since we don't recognize the name of the creditor. So my number one question at this point is do we go ahead and dispute or wait for the CR's. Since I just got my first one and it was only a couple days later that he ordered his, I'm thinking waiting a few more days to see what is in them won't hurt. What do you think?

 

Thanks, Sassy. I've been really impressed with all your knowledge and the stuff you come up with to help others. I'm looking forward to getting to know you better.

 

Thanks, Sassy. That link looks really good! I printed it out to study and also so DH can read it. I think you are right about reposting the questions in another thread. I will do that.

 

Hi, keepmine. SOL doesn't apply for at least another year. I think it has been about 2 years since he made a payment. SOL for where we live now is 3 years. SOL for where we lived when account was opened is 5! :-(

I think the biggest thing at this point, is to dispute as "not mine" especially since we don't even recognize the creditor name.