“Suffering From Bad Credit and Unsure of What to Do Next?”

My True Story Will Teach You the Secrets of Credit Repair and Help You Escape the Clutches of Debt Collection Companies Like Resurgent Capital Services

Over the past few months, I’ve learned more than I ever wanted to know about debt collection and credit scores. Unfortunately, I had to learn everything the hard way–through first hand experience of harassing debt collectors who ruined my credit. If you’re reading this, your troubles with debt collection have probably already begun.

However, even if your credit has already been damaged, there are quite a few things you can do to repair your credit and get debt collectors off your back at the same time. My personal experience is part cautionary tale and part success story, and I hope you can learn a lot from it.

First of all, let me tell you what I did wrong. I had a Sears credit card account go into default, and the account was picked up by a debt collection company called Resurgent Capital Services. This never should have happened, because the Sears account was not really in default! I’d disputed the card balance with Sears, and they had acknowledged their mistake and agreed to give me a credit on my statement. However, time passed and the credit never seemed to appear. I paid off the rest of the balance and assumed Sears would get around to issuing my credit eventually. So that was my first mistake: not being persistent enough to follow up with Sears until they actually applied the credit to my account.

I tried talking to Sears again, but they told me that once an account has been sold to a debt collector, it is completely out of their hands. Then I tried getting someone from Resurgent Capital Services on the phone. This was tricky because they use a whole network of subsidiary companies to service their accounts, so at first it wasn’t even clear who had been calling me about the Sears card.

Someone from Resurgent Capital Services called me every day, so you’d think it would have been easy to tell them my side of the story. However, the people who called seemed to have a pretty strict agenda. All they wanted to talk about was repayment. They would hardly even acknowledge the possibility that my debt could be invalid or inaccurate. I needed to get a supervisor on the line, and that entailed a whole lot of waiting on hold.

Since I wasn’t having any luck telling my side of the story over the phone, I decided to mail some letters. I wrote more than a few–in fact, too many! Writing too many letters can get your complaint labeled as “frivolous” and then it becomes even more difficult to get the debt collection company to take you seriously. Plus, I also made the mistake of sending my letters via regular mail. You need to send letters via certified mail, so that you can prove that the debt collector actually received them.

So here was my next mistake: trying to work directly with the debt collector. Instead of wasting time writing letters, waiting on hold, or trying to reason with completely unreasonable people, I should have gone straight to a lawyer. Although I had a very good argument as to the invalidity of my debt, I didn’t have the legal expertise to defend myself properly.

What I really needed to do was initiate a debt validation process. You only have 30 days to do this, from the time you are notified that your debt has gone into collections. Time was trickling away, and I was about to miss the window for using this powerful tool.

I floundered around for a few more weeks, until the constant phone calls and letters from Resurgent Capital Services finally pushed me over the edge. The final straw was when I received a notice from TransUnion stating that a collection item had been added to my credit report. I couldn’t believe it. After all the calls I’d made and letters I’d sent, Resurgent Capital Services had to realize that my debt was at the very least questionable, if not downright invalid. It took a lot of nerve to report such a questionable debt to the credit bureaus! When I pulled a copy of my credit report, I saw that the collection item had already depressed my credit score over 100 points!

I actually considered paying them! The amount in question was not very large, and it seemed like it might be easier to just pay up so they would leave me alone. Fortunately, my natural stubbornness kicked in and I resisted the urge.

I’m really glad I didn’t pay! I later learned that that would have been a huge mistake, for several reasons.

First of all, paying on an inaccurate debt can be seen as an admission of responsibility for that debt. If your debt is about ten years old, there’s a good chance that the statute of limitations on it has expired, making it illegal for anyone to attempt to collect on it. However, if you pay on that debt, the statute of limitations could actually be restarted!

Secondly, paying on a collection account often locks you into an interest and fee structure that significantly increases the total balance owed. You shouldn’t just agree to whatever amount the debt collector says. In reality, debt collection companies buy debts for pennies on the dollar, so they’re already turning a profit by getting you to repay the original amount. Don’t let them add to their profit by piling on fees! Get help negotiating a lower, fairer payment amount.

The most important reason not to pay a debt collector before hiring a lawyer is that paying does not necessarily mean that your credit will improve! Your credit will remain depressed as long as the collection item remains on your account. Debt collectors often neglect to remove the collection item, even after you’ve paid. That’s why it is so important to write credit repair into your payment agreement. Make sure the debt collector understands that they must remove the collection item for you once you pay.

Having narrowly escaped the dangers of paying Resurgent Capital Services without first getting professional advice, I finally came to my senses and realized I couldn’t handle the situation on my own.

This brings me to the one right choice I made during this whole process: I hired Lexington Law credit repair service.

Lexington Law is a well-established, successful credit repair law firm that has been around since 1991. Each year, they average about one million negative credit item deletions! They have an experienced staff of 24 attorneys and 200+ paralegals and agents in 19 states.

When I called Lexington Law, I had a free consultation with one of their representatives. Unlike the people from Resurgent Capital Services, Lexington Law’s staff proved to be very professional and courteous. Best of all, they actually LISTENED to my whole story.

The Lexington Law rep outlined a plan of attack for my case. She said that I had 5 days left in which to initiate the debt validation process, in which Resurgent Capital Services would be forced to PROVE that I owed the debt. Lexington Law would handle this for me and also investigate other aspects of the case. For example, they might be able to catch Resurgent Capital Services or their representatives in violation of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act or the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

Under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, debt collectors may not call you between 9 pm and 8 am, make excessive calls for the sole purpose of annoying you, or make baseless threats of legal action. Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, they cannot report any false information about you to any third party–including the credit bureaus. Reporting an invalid debt to TransUnion would fall into this category.

I gladly hired Lexington Law under their no-risk refund policy and let them go to bat for me. Within days, the harassing calls from Resurgent Capital Services stopped. Within a month, I got a new notice from TransUnion proving beyond a doubt that Lexington Law’s credit repair service had worked! The Resurgent Capital Services had been erased from my credit report. My credit score quickly began to recover, and today it is in the 700s.

I can’t stress enough how much help I got from Lexington Law. After weeks of struggling fruitlessly on my own to get through to Resurgent Capital Services and force them to remove the collection item from my credit report, Lexington Law came to my rescue.

I hope you can see from my story how very important it is to get professional credit repair help! Trust me, you can’t do it on your own. You need help, and Lexington Law is just the professional, experienced credit repair service to provide that help.