Re: Arbitration and Delinquency

Posted by Drew (24.59.27.46) on February 05, 2004 at 19:28:22:

In Reply to: Re: Arbitration and Delinquency posted by Bill Payer on February 05, 2004 at 17:30:35:

not dishonest about their situation I mean they are paying everyone but us. Or the people who are 7 months past due and when I talk to someone at their house they say of their on vacation. I don't think that people lie to me about what is going on. I think there are people who are lying about not being able to pay there bills when their credit reports show them as up to date.
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Bill payer there may be totally honest reasons why they are paying everyone else but you and they are update with everyone else but you. Sometimes it is a matter of they are in a financial bind and they made a list of their priorities. True deadbeats have a history of not paying anyone. They don't pay everyone. If you look at a credit report and you can see that the person has paid everyone for the past six years and they are paying mostly everyone but a few accounts, that is not a deadbeat. The credit report gives a seven year window. A true deadbeat will have charged off accounts from six years and are getting accounts charged off currently. It is a pattern. You will see it with a bunch of late pays on everything and you will see negative activity consistently. It is a far different picture from a person that has paid consistently and then in one year you see a bunch of charge offs. If a person has always paid and is paying other creditors, they are not deadbeats. There is a reason they are not paying you.

Maybe you are unsecured creditor with the highest balance and the person is trying to pay those others off and then try to deal with you later. Maybe someone at your company in customer service screwed them, lied to them, did not record their payments.

I have one account that I am not paying on. It was a loan husband cosigned for for his brother. Brother defaulted, hid his default from us for months, refused to contact us and tell us he was in trouble. By the time we found out from creditor, the situation was beyond our control to help him The amount owed was beyond our control to catch him up on. They repoed his mobile home and he was forced to move from his house. I am sure his creditor thinks we are the biggest deadbeats in the world but if we pay them, we will default on our own bills because there is simply not enough money to do it all. We could not help him. Do you think we wanted our brotherinlaw and his family homeless? No. But it had progressed beyond our control.

Now we face them coming after us for the deficiency and we don't have the money to pay the deficiency, to settle, or to make payments right now. HOwever we don't want to go bankrupt yet because that screws everyone. If we go bankrupt, our creditors who we are currently paying will get nothing and we don't want to blow those relationships if we don't have to.

It may not be the best choice. People will say "you shouldn't have cosigned," and yes, duh, they are right but we were not credit smart, we had no idea what we were getting into and we trusted our brotherinlaw. Now we know better. We can't change the past. We can only learn from it and go on.

If they are not paying you but they are paying others, it is not personal. It is because right now, it is to their advantage to pay off the smaller bills first and get out from them. Then apply those payments to larger bills.

You do the best that you can.

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