Gather Little by Little

Near the beginning of this month, I found a collections letter in the mail box. I opened it up to find a notice that we were 30 days overdue on a payment to a bank of which I had never heard.

I called the number provided as quickly as possible and discovered that this notice was in regards to our home equity line of credit, or second mortgage from the home that we sold last summer. You can read about some of the travails regarding our house that took 16 months to sell in these posts:

My house: a cautious reason to hope

Housing update: short sale, foreclosure, etc.

Congratulations! You just sold your house, now what?

If you remember, we had a first mortgage that was completely paid-in-full by the proceeds of the sale. Our second mortgage was a little more complicated – we were about $11,000 short of being able to pay that one off, so I was able to negotiate a deal with the credit union that allowed us to continue paying on that balance after the house sold. It was a good deal because we were not forced into a short sale, default or foreclosure – all of which have a negative effect on one’s credit score. Since the loan was now no longer backed by our home or any other collateral, it basically became an unsecured loan. I want to make every effort possible to pay back the money that we owed.

After the sale was completed, I called the credit union in order to check on repayment details and they said that they had given or sold (not sure which) the balance of the loan to their mortgage insurers. I think that the credit union must have collected on the mortgage insurance then the insurance company intended to collect the balance of the loan from me. Either way, I never knew what company was holding the note. I called and emailed the credit union at least three times and each time they said that “things were moving forward”. I wanted to make sure that I did not have an “overdue” notice go into my credit report. The credit union assured me that they had not reported the fact that I had not paid on the loan in months . . . so I waited.

Until three weeks ago, when I received a collections letter.

I was a little annoyed that things had progressed to this point since I had not had any idea where I was to send my HELOC payments and it has been nine months since we closed on the sale of our house. Anyway, I called and spoke to a customer service representative and found out that the loan was not at the mortgage insurer, but that they had given my note to a collections agency. I expressed my dismay at getting a collections letter as the first piece of correspondence regarding this loan since the sale of the house. He claimed that they had called me and written several times . . . you are going to have to trust me on this, but I never received any information.

I told the customer service representative that I would be happy to pay off the loan according to the original terms, as long as they sent me a paper statement that listed the terms of the loan, the size of my payments, interest information, etc. I was not going to just send a check to a company that I had never heard of before, just because I talked to one of their employees on the phone. I wanted to make sure that I knew the exact picture before I sent any money.

It has been three weeks and I have not yet seen that statement – no letter, no email, no phone calls. I would like to pay off this loan, but I need a little more information. So far, I have only had one notification letter that included no specifics on the loan and one phone call conversation initiated by me in nine months.

Seems like this particular collections agency has some trouble with communication, can I put a notification in their credit report?

Article by Stew

Photo by uberzombie