How to Deal With Debt Collectors

Video Transcript

"How to deal with debt collectors. Well, my main advice would be to avoid them if you can, that way you do not have to deal with them but if you're not that fortunate and you still have to deal with collectors, you may be receiving several harassing phone calls or just non-stop harassment at your job and your home. If you're already receiving phone calls in your office, you may want to tell them "please do not call me here, this is my place of employment, here's my home phone number,I'll willingly talk to you when I'm not in the office," because obviously you want to be a little careful with that because your employer have issues with it. Now if you are receiving this harassing phone calls at the house, now what you may want to do will be obviously tape the phone call, be honest and be straight forward with the debt collector and let them know what you can do and what you can not do. Obviously if you can afford to pay, they may come up with some payment plan. Tell them what you can comfortably pay them and try to find ways to mitigate the outstanding balances that you may owe them. An example would be if you owe them $5,000, you may want to say OK, I can pay $2,000 over such a period of time. But in terms of monthly payments, maybe $100 a month, $200 a month or whatever you can comfortably do and then tell them that when I'm done paying that, I will need you to do two things for me. One will be to obviously send you a letter saying that the account has been satisfied and has been paid down to zero. Just in case it's not being updated on the credit report. That you want to have some documentation that you can use and go back to a credit reporting agency to properly, you know, update this potential inaccuracies on your credit cards, credit report. Now the other thing to do as well would be to ask them to remove the derogatory credit, if you want to call it, or the main payment or whatever, to actually remove that entire account from your credit report like it was never there before because guess what that does? It increases your credit score and that's the quickest way to re-establish your credit back again. Now if you're privileged enough to be able to have the cash to be able to settle the account, do the same thing as well. Have them, just tell them hey, just don't lay down and you know, play dead and allow credit collectors to walk all over you because they're very aggressive. Their goal is to get back 100% of what you owe them but you can negotiate as well. You can go back and say instead of owing $5,000, you can say I have $1,000 cash that I can pay you today, now can we settle this account, you know give me that letter like we talked about and remove this things from my credit report? So, those would be what I would advise you to do in terms of dealing with debt collectors."