Saturna

today i did one of the things i hate more than anything, some things i have been avoiding for years and years. first, i went and started a savings account - my first ever. i am terrible at saving money, and having it around in cash makes it near impossible to accomplish. so now, i have one, with an automatic deduction each month on a specific date. go me!

while i was there, i asked about the process of clearing debt. eventually i will buy a house, but i have a lot of work to do until then. she gave me a cd to learn about credit and how to rehabilitate it and such. i have no looked at that yet, but i decided while i was on a roll to go ahead and finish accessing my yearly free credit reports that i started looking at last week.

they make it seem like this process is easy - "get your reports online!" and it is, i suppose, if they can "confirm your identity." well, two of the three could not the other day, and rather than call three different places i signed up for a free trial to get all three reports online through one place. they still could not confirm my identity, so i had to call and do it over the phone, but then i finally got to view all three of them.

i completely paid off an old $500 MLGW bill over the past two weeks, and it is still showing, but that did not stress me out because i know it takes a bit of time to rectify in their records and all. but i was really thrown for a huge loop when i saw a nearly 2k student loan that was not consolidated in with the others that i combined two summers ago. man, talk about pissed. it also did not show the last time i pulled my reports, three years ago. turns out it was under the wrong social security number and they had me living in somewhere New Mexico. i have not lived there since i was two years old.

so this thing is hanging out and doing its part to RUIN my credit score, which is poor, poor, poor on all three counts. boooooo. so i call the student loan people who hold my accounts, they direct me to the application for further consolidation. then i call the original loan holder, who sends me to a collections place, who then sends me to another collections place. i finally end up speaking with a very southern Leslie, in Mobile, Alabama.

at first she kept interrupting me and talking over me and doing her best to establish her dominance in the conversation. little does she know that i grew up learning exactly what my rights are in regards to collections, and that she has no right to treat me as anything other than an equal, and that i am here, approaching this and dealing with it within moments of finding out about it, in good faith. with some firmness on my part, she finally dropped the front and gave me my options.

since it is a student loan, i have choices. i could take the info and consolidate it tomorrow. but it is in default... so on my credit report from here to eternity, or however long they carry that stuff over, it would read as a charge off, bad debt. then she tells me if i pay $30 a month for the next 9-12 months, the debt will be completely rehabilitated and i can then consolidate it, with a label of good standing. good deal. i have enough charge offs on my reports. the debts are paid, but they were not paid according to the monthly agreement.

this credit stuff is sticky and hard to understand, but i learned a lot today. it was really driven home to me the importance of not only paying off debt, but carrying that monthly note. once i get that one loan rehabilitated and consolidated, then all of my student loans will be under one very manageable monthly payment. whew.

there are some others out there that are not reporting. there is the one number i get recorded phone calls from three time a week. i know who they are, i know what it is for, i press ignore every time because i know they will try to tell me they will take my firstborn child if i do not pay it all to them, right now. i am going to wait until i have about half of what i owe them saved up, then call. it is huge medical bill from when jah isaac was three months old and had to go to the ER on july 4th.

other than that, there were things that were NOT on there, that i know are out there and that i owe. so how my question is, how do i deal with those? if they have written them off and they are that old that they are not reporting them, do i just not worry about it? somehow i think not. i would like to proactively deal with this crap, instead of it biting me on the ass.

so my day was very stressful with all of this. jah isaac is wearing very thin on me working at home, jumping on my head and being very demanding whenever i try to get anything accomplished. of course, if i were to sit there and not be doing anything, available for him - he would ignore me. classic four year old syndrome i suppose - i happens anytime i call melanie. it is quiet until her kids realize the phone is to her ear, then all hell breaks loose.

so, a very productive day, but i still hate dealing with the stuff. i do, however, feel empowered by having done it.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 21st, 2007 at 10:14 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.