Tag Archives: credit report

What Can I Do NOW — I Can’t Pay My Bills

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One of the worst parts of the Coronavirus shutdown is the uncertainty.  When will it end?  What bills will still have to be paid?  When will they have to be paid?  Will my job still be there?

No matter what the answers are to any of those questions, there are some things you can start doing now to be prepared for whatever the answers are.

Here is a list:

  • Check your credit report;
  • Make a list of everyone you owe money to — names, addresses, account  numbers, contact telephone number, total amount owed, payment amount due;
  • Get your 2019 taxes prepared if they aren’t already (and any missing prior years while you are at it);
  • Review your household budget;
  • Collect pay stubs or other evidence of income for at least six months.

This information will help you deal with creditors when it is time to do that.  It will help you apply for whatever forms of assistance may be available for you.  It will help you prioritize what income you have (now or later); and, if necessary, it will facilitate a bankruptcy filing if that becomes necessary.

Elaine

Bored? Check Your Credit Report

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Nobody ever has the time to check their credit reports, go through them carefully, decipher the codes and columns — until they are closing on a new house on Tuesday, and there is a problem.  Then, I get to explain that a credit report dispute takes at least 30 days.

However, when you are sheltering in place or quarantined or social distancing that’s a great time.  You an get a free copy of your credit report from www.annualcreditreport.com  .  You are entitled to one free report from each of the three major Credit Reporting Agencies (CRA’s) every year.  (You can get additional free copies for other reasons, like a denial of credit.)  So, start by downloading your credit report.  Then, go through it carefully.  This is the hard part.  Don’t just check the names of the creditors, like with so many things, the Devil is in the details.  Check the payment history, the outstanding balance, the monthly payment amount, the date of last activity (which should be the last time you used or made a payment on the account, it should not be the time the present owner of the account bought it).   Those things can make huge differences in your access to credit.  Make sure they are all correct.

If you find something that is not correct, dispute it.  You will get information for disputing it online.  If you want to do that for a first dispute, fine; but do a screen shot or otherwise record the terms and time of the dispute just in case.  Remember, the Credit Reporting Agencies don’t work for you.  You are not their customer.  Their customers are the people who pay them, and those people are the creditors who report to the CRA’s.  If the first dispute is not successful.  I suggest doing it again, and doing it in writing and sent by certified mail.  Although, I also suggest talking to a lawyer at that point in time.

Elaine

Bankruptcy, Tax Returns and Identity Theft

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Looking at the title to this post, I must say that those are not words I ever expected to be putting in one sentence — but then this morning happened.  Let me begin at the beginning.  Early this morning I got an email from a friend of mine with a link to this article:

http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/03/experian-lapse-allowed-id-theft-service-to-access-200-million-consumer-records/

Evidently, some time ago Experian (one of the three major credit reporting services) bought a company called Court Ventures.  Now, from what I gleaned from Google, Court Ventures is a company that collects public record information on people.  I assume from the name that they tend to focus on court house type records.  Whether or not they are collecting Bankruptcy court records, I don’t know.  Regardless, many bankruptcy cases wind up being referenced in State Court files.  The most common reason for that is when a bankruptcy is filed and there is a pending state court case (a foreclosure, a collection case, anything like that), a Notice is filed in the state court case that the case has been stayed by the Bankruptcy filing.  This notice is sometimes called a Suggestion of Bankruptcy.  This notice includes the bankruptcy case name, case number, and the bankruptcy court in which the bankruptcy is filed.  So, if Court Ventures is collecting courthouse based public records, they are collecting bankruptcy filing notices — albeit indirectly.

Court Ventures then had a contract with another data collection company, US Info Search.  From them a Vietnamese man, who was in the ID theft business,  bought access to both US Info Search data and Court Ventures data — kind of the warehouse shopping model for Identity theft.  Ultimately, this Vietnamese man was able to sell to his customers access to names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, addresses, former addresses, phone numbers and email addresses — among other things.

The article goes into considerably more detail, and it is quite interesting and well worth reading.  Still, you might be wondering what this has to do with tax returns and bankruptcy clients.  An increasingly common form of ID theft is to file a fraudulent tax return for the victim of the ID theft in an attempt to steal the victim’s tax refund.

Shortly after reading this article this morning I received an email from a Chapter 13 client of mine letting me know that she didn’t have her tax return ready quite yet.  You see, she was working with the IRS to unravel it, but evidently someone had filed a tax return for her in an attempt to abscond with her refund.

That got me thinking.  I wonder how many bankruptcy clients assume (rightly or wrongly) that their Trustee is entitled to their tax refunds, so when the refund doesn’t appear; they don’t go looking for it?  I have had a number of clients over the years receive correspondence from the IRS that they don’t understand (and that may or may not make sense to me), but they don’t follow up on it.  They don’t call the IRS and get them to explain something to them or ask what something means or why it happened.  They just assume.

So, don’t do that.  Nobody in Vietnam deserves your refund more than you do.

Elaine