|
There are always circumstances in life that will always result to financial troubles. For example, a divorce or sudden unemployment could leave you financially-incapable of fulfilling the most simplest of obligations like paying your bills. These debts would naturally be collected by your creditors but if no payment has been made for as long as 120 days, these debts would be written-off as losses. Most creditors do not have any other choice but to do this for tax purposes.
|
|
Once your debts are written off, it does not mean that efforts to collect them are stopped. If the creditor chooses to; these debts are sold to a collection agency and becomes collection accounts. Collection agencies usually purchase these accounts for just a fraction of their original amount. These collection accounts will now be collected using every means possible, sometimes even harassment. A particular collection agency will hold these collection accounts for a certain period, usually just for a couple of months. If all methods are exhausted, they will forward these collection accounts to another agency until such time that they are paid or a lawsuit is filed.
|
|
Collection accounts, like charge-offs, are reported in your credit report for seven years whether paid or unpaid. Unfortunately, there are plenty of collection agencies that reset the age of the collection account to zero upon receiving them. In short, even if the debt has been made five or six years ago and reported, once the collection agency received it as a collection account, you will have to wait for another seven years before they are removed from your credit report.
Most people are not aware of this and become inconvenienced for a very long time. If you have not yet experienced this, you are lucky. But as circumstances change, you should be prepared fro such situation. One of the best things you could do is to make sure that your credit reports contain accurate entries especially the dates of the reported delinquencies, collection accounts, charge-offs and others. You should also make sure that any payment you have made should be reported. If you find some discrepancies, you should contact the credit agency and report it at once.
Settling a collection account is always recommended, unless you want to suffer from the inconvenience of a bad credit score as well as the harassment of these collection agents. As soon as you are financially-stable enough to address these debts, you should make sure that you contact your creditors or collection agency. You can always try to negotiate payment arrangements, one that is manageable. You should never commit to an arrangement that you would find difficult to fulfill.
As soon as the collection account has been settled, it would be reported to your credit report in three ways: paid in full, collection account paid or simply paid. Again, these records will remain in your credit report for the next seven years from the date of the first delinquency. But then, it is so much better than having an unpaid debt on your report
|
