Communicating With Collection Agencies or Departments
Posted on April 24th, 2012 By: Access My Scores
One of the most oftentimes overlooked and extremely stressful aspects to raising your credit score and restoring your credit history is communicating with collection agencies. Since paying back what you owe in past delinquent or overdue accounts is arguably the most effective action you can take if you want to get your credit back on track as quickly as possible, this simply shouldn’t be the case.
Thankfully, there’s not a whole lot to learn and understand about dealing and communicating with collection agencies. Although strategies for dealing with them differed in the past, now that the economy is in such turmoil and so many people owe money all over the place, you actually have a bit more leverage than people did back in the day.
Ultimately, these collection agencies (or even the direct company representatives you’ll be dealing with if the account in question has yet to go to collections) operate by giving their employees a commission based on what they can collect at any given time. This is usually the ruse they use when you call up and ask to get on some kind of payment plan – they basically say that it’s impossible and that their particular agency or company does not operate in such a way in order to get the biggest possible commission from you.
Thankfully, you can still play off their greed by refusing to give into their demands. After all, a small commission is better than no commission at all, yes?
Basically, the only thing that you need to remember going into your dealings with these people is that, these days, almost every agency or company will elect to place you on a payment plan in lieu of not getting any money at all. Simply make it clear that you cannot – no matter what – pay the amount you owe in full, due to various reasons (you don’t need to go into specifics, no matter how much they harp on the subject). Just say something simple like job difficulties, other billing arrangements or just bills in general make the prospect of you paying everything out in full literally impossible.
We’ll be posting more in the coming weeks about other strategies to use when dealing with collection agencies or directly company collection departments. Until then, you have all the truly important and crucial knowledge that you need – so go and get to work!
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
