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In an effort to help financial
services organizations collect on large volumes of uncollected debt,
Experian(R), a global information solutions provider, today announced the
launch of Collection Triggers(SM). Collection Triggers is a robust and
flexible collections solution that monitors a company’s portfolio of
collections accounts. When new information on one of these accounts becomes
available, indicating the possibility of recovering the debt, the organization
is notified within 24 hours and can then resume efforts to contact the
consumer and collect the outstanding debt.

So you are now getting back on your feet and are ready to start paying off old debt? The old advice was to just call one creditor at a time and setup a payment plan with them. This would avoid the barrage of calls and mail from all your old creditors at once, and allow you to pay off the debts one at a time. But if one of those creditors subscribes to this new collection trigger service, as soon as you start making payments to one creditor, you are going to “trigger” others to start coming after you.

Read the full press release: Experian Collection Triggers

How Bankruptcy Works

I recently paid off my student loan debt. Felt great! I have been out of college since 1995. That is 11 years of debt that was hanging over me. Part of the problem was right after school everyone told me. “Don’t worry about student loan debt.” Not sure why everyone felt this was good advice, but I seemed to hear it over and over. So soon within a year of graduating I consolodated all my loans thus taking down a 400 month payment to around 200. And there it pretty much sat for about 9 years. Month after month….felt like the payment had always been there and would always be there. I didn’t see anyway of getting rid of so much student loan debt. In that long time, it had barely budged downward.

It was time to get serious, so for a few years I hammered away and saved up and worked anything extra I could do. It feels to great to get rid of that burden.

Going through school, I never thought more than a second about the loans I was getting. After all everyone does it right. Just sign on the line and move on. I didn’t even have any idea how much I really owed until I was all done with school.

Now that the debt is gone… (actually all my debt is gone except for my home but I’ll get into this later on), it feels great.