I just talked with my sister and she has some exciting news … but first a tiny bit of background history:
When she left her ex (with good cause), she ended up getting stuck with a lot of debt that he’d run up on credit cards. Granted the divorce settlement said that he was responsible for it, but when he stopped making payments the credit card companies came after her anyway. They do not care about decrees and such … they just want their money. So for the last several years she has been working long hours, working two jobs, etc. to protect her “credit rating” … it has come to a point where it is affecting her health, her ability to parent her children well, and her general quality of life.
She just told me that in the last two weeks, two of the three companies have offered to settle with her for approximately 25 cents on the dollar. She will pay the settlement amount over the next four months and the debt will be gone. She will be able to work a normal amount of hours and be there for her kids like she has wanted to do all along.
This is an incredible miracle, as she was considering bankruptcy she had become so desperate. Doing the happy dance, we are!
A Scribbler & A Shutterbug 
wonderful!
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Wow – that’s awesome!
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That is such great news for her. So pleased to hear it. I hate it when the ‘innocent’ one gets stuck with crap like that.x
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That’s fantastic news.
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That’s great! I love hearing stories like this. What a big burden off her back.
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I know she must feel like a mountain has been removed from her shoulders. I’m curious how she went about doing that. We have some left over debt from my husband’s previous marriage and some of our own from college that I’d like to be settled sooner rather than later. Can you outline her gameplan, I didn’t know they’d do such a thing.
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@WVCountryRoads – I don’t know that she had a gameplan … I honestly think this was a God thing … she’d stopped paying on some things just because she couldn’t come up with the money, thinking the companies would charge it off. Then a few weeks ago she talked about filing bankruptcy because she was exhausted from having it all still “out there” hanging over her head. Out of the blue, the companies contacted her and made their settlement offers. I don’t know if they realized what was going on and figured “better some money than no money” or what, but that’s pretty much what happened. I know I’ve heard Dave Ramsey talk about contacting your creditors and offering them say 50 cents on the dollar to settle the debt. All they can say is no, or give you a counter offer, or better yet, accept your offer. It was really weird (and wonderful) in her case, though, because she did not call them.
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Praise God! That is fantastic!
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That is great! I hope it does not show up as a negative on her credit rating. But I guess if she had stopped paying, she already has some negative stuff on there.
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@SingingMom – It’s amazing … her credit rating is really not that bad from what I understand, but even if it affects it, she has health issues that the work hours are really affecting. She has Hashimoto’s (thyroid problem) and she really needs to take better care of herself. So what price your health, you know? Before leaving her ex, he opened up credit cards in her name without her knowledge and ran up major debt. From what I understand, identity theft by family members is pretty common … and so sad. And the credit card companies just don’t care.
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@TXMom2Jami – Yeah…it’s just too hard to prove in a family, whether or not that person really did give permission to open the account. And nowdays, when you can apply on a computer, it’s even easier, because you don’t need a signature. All you need is the information, like SS#, birthday, etc.I have Hashimoto’s, too. I understand. It runs in my family.
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That’s awesome!!
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