My First Rant (tm) - Creditors are Assholes

The BBQ Pit
1

Alright, so I’ve never started my own thread here before. But I just wanted to say.

GAH!

Gah gah gah gah gah gah gah gah gah gah gah gah gah gah!

Yes, I know my credit rating has some blotches on it. I defaulted on a student loan inadvertantly because they sent the notices to my student address in St. Louis rather than my home address in Indiana; and my fuckwad family never told me.

My former roommate stole the rent money for pot 3 months running, and we got evicted.

My chequebook was stolen and the asshole wrote some very, very, very bad cheques. You have him on videotape trying to access my account.

Then I was driving without insurance (thanks, asshole roommate, for not only stealing my money but also losing your job and making me choose between which bills I should pay - ironically, I chose ‘rent’ - and which I shouldn’t. Jerk.) and someone hit my car.

But you know what?

Every single time one of these creditor fucks has called me, I’ve paid them. Every time. Even the ones about the bad cheques, for whom I provided a police report. Yes. I paid the twats. I paid them because they claimed that the cheque the fucking asshole thief wrote was “not in the book of cheques that were stolen.” Yes, somehow, cheque number 150, by their logic, was not in the first book of cheques. “It goes from 101 to 149”, they say. “150 - 200 are in the second book.” Odd, that, how the first book you get has 49 cheques and the second has 51 - what the fuck kind of reality do they live in?!? But no, they’d rather lie to me and force me to pay them (under threat of “the surgical removal of funds from my wages” and “R-9ing your credit” or something like that) rather than admit that they might - just maybe - have been wrong. Fuckwads.

I paid the $2300 worth of damage my 1988 Ford Escort Pony somehow did to that 1965 Buick Skylark tank of yours that you rammed into it! (But oddly enough, my car, you know, the tin can on wheels, suffered from only a broken headlight thingy. Grr.)

Three weeks after the student loan guys finally put two and two together to make four and called me at my actual residence, I paid them off. Three weeks. Three. It was a simple fucking misunderstanding and I rectified it as quickly as I could because I feel damn guilty about having outstanding bills!

I have a car loan. For $5432.10. You gave me that, sure, at 20% interest, but still, you gave me that. It was a 30-month loan and I have paid off every god-damned payment but two of them, and it’s only been 15 months since I bought the car.

But they won’t give me a fucking cheque card.

No, apparently, it’s not the point that you have to have the money in your account before you can use the card, or that it works just like any of the 20 chequebooks you’ve already sent me. It’s not the point that I pay my bills when they come up, and have done so for three fucking years. But I can’t have a cheque card because “my credit rating isn’t good enough”?! Not good enough? Good enough for over $5000, but not good enough to access my fucking cheque account with a card? Not good enough to stamp “VISA” on? Fuck you!

Have I not jumped through hoops to clear my fucking credit report? I’ve paid things I legally shouldn’t have had to, I throw money at you assholes right and left, I have had my job for over two years now and I’m quite secure in it, the USPS doesn’t just go bankrupt no matter how financially bad their situation is. You fucking owe me that cheque card.

In short, you creditor asshole fuckwads can suck my used tampon.

Jerks.

GAH!

2

I like the way you spell “cheque”…

3

Having read through your rant, which by the way, I give a 10, mainly because I have been there, I am guessing that your main gripe is that you can’t get a check (I like how you spell it too:) ) card.

I had a checking account 4 or 5 years ago. It very quickly developed into a major nightmare. Mostly because it was the banks fault. They did not deposit my paycheck into the right account. But they would not admit any wrong doing. So, about 20 checks or so later, which all bounced, I closed the account. All of the bad checks were reported to Telecheck or one of those places. 1 1/2 years later I got a letter in the mail from a collection company demanding payment of all of the “bad check charges” – $350.00 worth. I paid it, mainly just to get it off my record. My whole point is this. In May, I finally opened a new checking account at another bank, but the only reason I was able to is that I knew the New Accounts person and a couple of other people at the bank. They look at what Telecheck, Checksystems or others say about you. I really don’t think that it has much to do with your credit rating. If it did, I would never get any kind of an account. :smiley: And as far as a check card goes, even though I know those people, I still have to wait for 6 months from the time I opened the account to apply for a check card. I guess it is to prove myself “worthy”. :rolleyes: . I can’t bounce any checks. Well, if I planned on bouncing checks, I would never have opened the account in the first place.

At any rate, good luck.

4

Well if they looked at that I should have been safe. All but one of the bounced cheques written by the thief (32 in total) were forgiven by the companies they were written to the moment I showed them the police report. Only Pizza Hut decided to continue prosecution and make me cough up $273 for the $18 cheque (#150) that was written there. And I paid it! :frowning: I’ve been banking at this bank for 8 years now and I have never personally written a cheque that bounced.

The lady on the phone told me in no uncertain terms that VISA had denied my request for a cheque card because of “unsightly splotches” on my credit report.

Arg! The more I think about it the more pissed I get. Thanks for the 10.

And the spelling is spiffy, isn’t it? I have been spelling that way since I was 13, because I thought it looked so darn cool :slight_smile: Now that I am planning to move to Australia it will come in handy grins

5

Nice to know that $18 is that important to Pizza Hut.

6

Did the creditors force you to take out those loans? When you incur a debt, you are responsible for repaying it. What, did you forget you had a student loan outstanding? What were you thinking while those months slipped by? “Oh, boy. I fell through the crack and I don’t have to pay anybody anything!”? Did somebody make you drive without insurance? Did you sue your roommate to get your rent money back? Do you seriously expect to be so irresponsible and still find some sucker who will extend even more credit to you? Unbelievable. You act like they owe you something. You got it backwards, pal.

What a lame rant. I give it a big fat zero.

7

Maybe you just need better roommate selection criteria.

8

Was it your roommate who stole your chequebook as well?

9

Lib, I have one loan, it’s for my car, I’m happy with that and I have paid off all but $466 of it a mere 15 months into the loan. I like that loan. Even at its atrocious 20% interest. It’s a nice loan. It’s the reason I don’t understand why they won’t give me a cheque card. They gave me $5000 so why not a cheque card? See?

About the college loan, I attended Washington U of St Louis for one year. It was $20200 tuition and I was under the impression that they had covered all of it, because I was never asked to sign any loan papers. I was unaware that the “work-study program”, which they expected to cover $750 of the yearly tuition, was supposed to go toward my tuition. The job they had assigned me was filing in an office. I wanted something related to the medical field which was what I was studying, and I made arrangements to switch jobs with a friend who was a biology lab assistant (cleaning Petri dishes isn’t -much- related to the medical field but it’s better than filing student records). He took over my filing job and when I went to the lab the next day they had found another student to take his place.

I (yes, incorrectly) assumed that this $750 - which I didn’t need, I had a job outside of the college that covered my parking permits and the cost of living with family members off-campus and driving there every day - was unnecessary to cover the tuition and so I did not exactly bust my ass to get another work-study job while I was busting my ass in sophomore and junior-level courses in my freshman year.

I moved back to Indiana after that and changed schools. Had I known that it was a “loan against my tuition” and not a job, I still would not have expected to pay that back because it was my (perhaps incorrect, but I read it in the description for federally-granted student loans) understanding that they would not bill you for a student loan until you had no longer been taking classes for 6 months.

When I did not receive any bills in my mail, and because I had no reason to believe that I had any loan outstanding, I did not immediately call their loan board to inquire. I didn’t know there was anything to inquire about. The very moment they contacted me and explained the situation (which was during the second semester of my classes in Indiana) I paid them. It took me two paycheques, or 3 weeks, to come up with that money.

No, nobody made me drive without insurance. Like I wrote in my first post, my roommate lost his job, thus, I had to pay all the bills. I did not have the money to pay every bill we had. I thought, “Well, if I don’t pay the rent I’ll get evicted. If I don’t pay my car insurance I’ll just be driving around without insurance. As soon as I can afford it again I will get a new policy.” I am not contesting that it was bad to do so. I am contesting that there could possibly have been $2300 in damage to their car (a tank) when my car had such little damage that I never even had to fix it. I paid that bill, too, the moment it came up.

No, I did not sue my roommate. I did not have a lawyer nor did I have the money for a lawyer after I was evicted and had to find a new place to live. Not to mention that he has not held a job for more than a month since, and has often gone three or four months without a job at all. Suing him would get me nothing but lawyer bills that I couldn’t, at that time, afford to pay. I don’t see how suing my roommate would in any way repair the damage to my credit rating by the reported eviction, anyway.

Now, after all of this has happened - and yes, I know it was my fault for moving in with a deadbeat (though I did not know he was a deadbeat when we moved in together) and my fault for choosing the wrong bill to pay and my fault for not understanding the nature of the “work-study program” - and I have paid it all off, the creditors found me worthy of a $5000+ loan, but not worthy of a cheque card. They made me pay them - illegally, in my mind, because they lied to me during the court appointment and the police report clearly showed (along with my record saying that I had cancelled those cheques) that my chequebook has been stolen - and yes, I think that, in some way, they owe me a cheque card.

I am not arguing that they made me pay the bills which I consider legitimate - the $2300 for the car accident, the $1100 for the “work-study program” - I am arguing that after all of this, they let me take out a loan but not a cheque card? Am I the only person who finds that a little odd, and a little annoying?

10

Ender - yes, that much is obvious now :slight_smile: That same former roommate, by the way, has three times asked me if I want to “go halfsies” on renting a house. Heh. No thanks, bud, I learned my lesson the first time.

pennylane, no. The guy who stole my chequebook stole it from my car, and went around claiming he was my husband or my brother and that I was sick at home and unable to go out so I gave him my chequebook and my drivers’ license and my social security card (they were all in my purse, which is what he actually stole) so that he could buy me food/medicine/a TV from Wal-Mart/a fax machine from Office Max/a VCR from K-Mart. Every store but Pizza Hut had him on their security tape and I pressed charges. AFAIK the guy hasn’t been found yet, and I don’t hold out much hope.

11

Well I’m sorry you’ve had such rotten luck, Caiata.

You seem to be unusually responsible and trustworthy for a college student. Especially when compared to me - I had no excuse for my credit card bills and when the creditors knocked on my door I fled the country.

I’d advise you to do the same but it looks like you’ve already made plans to relocate… :wink:

12

Look, Caiata, I have nothing against you personally. But I think you’re being incredibly myopic here. The car served as collateral for the five grand. A creditor would have no collateral for a check card. (No, the money in the account isn’t collateral, and if you think it is, then maybe that’s a clue about how these problems keep arising for you.)

You need to stop and assess this thing from outside your own little box. You have a loooooong history of financial screw-ups and bad decisions. What makes that even worse is your attitude about it. You’re blaming everything and everybody except for the person who is to blame. You have a reason and an excuse for each and every mishap. You let your bloodsucking roommate go for three months without paying.

The skinny of it is that you just don’t know how to handle money and you don’t want to learn. You want credit when you’re not creditworthy. And you expect other people to be as loosey-goosey with their money as you are with yours, and hand some of it over to you.

If you don’t straighten these things out (and I mean things inside you, not things others have done), you are facing many many miserable years ahead of you. My advice? Bite the bullet. Stop making excuses. Repair your credit. Learn sound financial management. Be thankful that you’ve learned this lesson early, and then grow up. Running to Australia won’t help. You’ll be the same person when you get there.

Nobody owes you anthing. You might think I’m mean, but I’m giving you some good advice here. Don’t squander it.

13

Not a comment on your spate of luck and /or how you have handled it, I just wanted to say that the bane of my existence was a check card. “Hmmm do I want this CD?” “Hmmm, do I want this book?” “Hey it’s easy enough to pay for, I can just whip out my check card.” This was many years ago and I was delirous with the ease in which I could pay for things. Weird thing was I was quite responsible with my credit cards, wanting to avoid the finance charges and all that. But that check card seemed to be like crack, it just leeched the money out of my bank account. I just couldn’t budget on the fly with that bugger. Haven’t had one since. I know it is illogical, but I ain’t no Vulcan.

14

Humm-You could move to Canada - I’m convinced that its WAAAAY easier to get credit in Canada than in the states.

I keep seeing ads on TV (American Stations) advertising getting a credit card with a $500 limit, and all you have to do is put down the $500. Huh? Then it’s not credit - it’s a savings account in card form.

Bizzarre.

Anyhow - having had 14 credit cards at a time (bank cards, visas, MC’s AMEX, store cards, etc. etc), I can say you’re way further ahead without it - you just wind up paying huge interest charges, assuming that this mystical “Cheque Card” that you’re talking about is anything like a credit card. Is this thing just a debit card? I’m so confused.

15

Just to clarify a few points:

That is not the way a check card works. Your account balance is not checked when you use the card for a purchase. Even if a real time balance check was feasible it wouldn’t be helpful because there is no way for the bank to know what checks are already outstanding against that balance. The bank has some algorithms based on your account history (avg. balance, how long it’s been open, number of overdrafts, etc) that determine whether your card is accepted or declined. The algorithm results are stored in a file at the card verifier. When the check card is run through the machine the flat file is accessed, the purchase amount is compared to the limit generated by the algorithm and the purchase is approved or declined. It is entirely possible to overdraw your account with a check card. Overdraft = unsecured loan, hence the credit check.

Close, but not exactly. A check card is accepted at far more places than a check, thus more opportunity to overdraw. A check card purchase, once approved, cannot be returned to the merchant like an NSF check. That means the bank is on the hook for any losses. Higher risk for the bank = higher approval standards. It’s the same reasoning behind your 20% car loan when a person with good credit could have gotten the same loan for 10% or less.

Again, you’re comparing a secured loan at a very high interest rate versus a potential unsecured loan at 0% interest. In banking it’s all about mitigating risk. Default on your car loan and the bank takes your car. Plus, assuming you made some payments, they’ve already made enough money at 20% to cover some of the expenses associated with collection efforts, repossesion and sale of your ex-vehicle. The money they loaned you only cost them 4-5% interest. A 16% spread covers a lot of sins. An overdraft, on the other hand, not only means the bank has loaned you that amount at no interest, it also means that they cannot loan that money to someone else at the going rate. They are losing income by allowing your overdraft.

Visa has no say what-so-ever in the approval of check cards or credit cards. That is solely the pervue of the card issuer, be that a bank, brokerage house, or whatever. Visa is really nothing more than a brand name and does not approve, issue or process cards or payments. They do approve card issuers, but that affects you zero. If the bank told you that ‘Visa’ declined you, they are lying.

Sorry to get so GQ in MPSIMS, but hopefully now you understand some of the mechanics of the issue behind your rant.

16

blinks

Lib, I don’t have anything against you either. But I don’t understand where you’re implying that I’m not taking full responsibility here.

I “let” him go three months without paying because we signed a lease together. There were only two ways out of that - if a job forced one or both of us to relocate to a different city or state, we could then break the lease and take in new roommates or dissolve the lease entirely; or if they evicted us. Those were the terms of the lease that I signed, and that he signed. It would have been illegal to kick him out and then take in a new roommate who was not on the lease. If they would have found that, they would have evicted me too.

I know that it was stupid to drive without insurance. I knew it at the time I made that bad decision. What else could I have done? I’m asking this seriously, here. I was already working 60-hour weeks at the pizza joint trying to make the money to pay the rent. I signed up with a temp agency to take a second job (but got evicted before I ever got one) and I rode my roommate’s ass constantly about getting a job, but I can’t force him to do something. It was all a bad decision, the whole situation, one bad decision begot another. I haven’t done it since, and I don’t intend to. I learned from it. I have maintained quite expensive insurance policies ever since.

It was not my decision to have my purse stolen. I know I should not have left it in my car. But I did. That was my decision, and I haven’t done it since. I don’t carry all my identification in the same place anymore, either. Because I learned from that mistake.

Yes, there is a reason for every mishap. There’s a reason for every single thing that has ever happened in the entire world. You fault me for explaining these reasons? You questioned my behaviour regarding the student loan and assumed right off the bat that it was my irresponsibility at fault. It was not my irresponsibility but it was my ignorance of the way it was supposed to work. If I had known, I would have either taken another work-study job or I would have paid the $750 outright from my off-campus job. But I didn’t know. I can’t do anything about something I don’t know about, can I? I’m sorry if that seems irresponsible to you, and perhaps it was irresponsible to not understand it, but nobody else in my family has ever been to college before and they all thought the same as I did - the college was providing me with an on-campus job so that I wouldn’t have to get an off-campus job if I didn’t want one or couldn’t maintain it, and so that I could work in my intended field if I so desired. Now I know, but I haven’t had to worry about student loans ever since - not only will the government not give me one because of this, but also I simply prefer to pay for my schooling up-front instead of taking loans. (Academic scholarships made up most of my schooling when I was going, and when I came back here to Indiana I paid for what the scholarship did not cover. Personally. Out of money I earned in my job.)

I have handled my money responsibly ever since this all happened three or more years ago. You’re right when you say that I don’t understand all the credit laws - I don’t. I took Economics over the summer so that I would have an easier class, because I knew I wouldn’t cut it in a regular course. On the surface it does not make sense, to me, that they would give me $5000 but not give me a cheque card (not a credit line, I didn’t apply for the “over-drought loan” that goes along with it and loans you money to cover it if you “bounce” a cheque). It does not make sense to me that I receive ‘pre-approved’ offers for credit cards (with such high annual fees and interest rates that I never bother to take them, but still, it’s the principle) but I cannot get this cheque card, but I can still write cheques. It does not make sense to me that 15 months of paying off car payments in a timely, and in fact ahead-of-schedule, fashion has done nothing to improve my credit rating. But I can add, I can subtract, I can manage my bills. And I find it offensive that they cannot see this, and assume that I have not changed.

I am not asking for more credit. I am asking for a way to access my cheque account without fishing out my chequebook. I honestly do not know what the difference is between having the ability to write a cheque that may or may not bounce, and having the ability to swipe a card that deducts money directly from my cheque account that may or may not bounce. In either situation (neither of which has yet happened nor would happen - I had a cheque card in Missouri and used it responsibly, at the gas station and that was about it, I have never once personally drawn more money out of my account than was there) I would still have to pay the overdraught fee and the transferring-funds-from-savings-account-to-cheque-account fee and pay the $20 returned-cheque fee from the store to whom I made the bad payment, and pay for the item that I bought as well as processing costs.

I am however quite interested in repairing my credit rating, but as I am saving money to move to Australia and to pay for University there (fear not, I cannot get a student loan for that Uni, and if I don’t pay for it I can’t stay in the country, so you won’t hear me whining about a misunderstood student loan ever again) I cannot currently afford to go brush up on my credit laws. I was under the impression that paying off all outstanding debts and then maintaining periodical payments such as car loans, rent, insurance bills, phone bills, cellular phone bills, etc., was the only way to repair one’s credit rating. I have done nothing but that since I was evicted nearly three years ago. I honestly do appreciate the advice, but saying “repair your credit rating” really doesn’t help much - how do I go about doing that, without paying “finance counselors” a buttload of money? I don’t have any current debts (except for $466 which will be paid off by the end of November), I don’t have anything to consolidate.

And for your information, I am not running to Australia in the hopes of “fixing” all of this. I imagine they have creditors in that country too. I am moving to Australia to take a degree in forensic science and to be with the man I intend to marry. The only thing I am “running from” is being 10,000 miles from the man I love. Capiche?

17

Shhot, we’re not in MPSIMS, we’re in the Pit. Please append the following to the end of my last post:

Dammit.

18

Alice - yeah, it’s a debit card, but we call 'em cheque cards in Indiana, sorry for the confusion :slight_smile:

Doctor Jackson - in that last line I read what you meant, not what you typed :slight_smile:

And thank you for the explanation. Due to our simulpost you prolly didn’t see that I didn’t apply for nor ask for the overdraught coverage - in fact I told the lady when I put in the application that under no circumstances did I want the overdraught loan option - but I guess it doesn’t matter with the difference between cheque cards and cheques.

The way I got the impression that they check your balance every time you use a cheque card is because when a friend of mine was renting a car, he was using his cheque card, and we had put the $90 cost of the car rental in his account the day before. We didn’t know that the car rental place reserves an additional $200 in case you return the car with damage, so they wanted us to have $290 in the account. When they swiped his cheque card they knew instantly that there was not enough money in his account to process that request, and we had to drive to his bank, deposit $200 more, and wait for the transaction to go through. Once that happened and we returned to the car rental place, they swiped his cheque card and were able to process the request.

Other than that experience I have never used nor knowingly been near someone who used their cheque card to pay a bill they could not afford, so I was under the impression that the cheque card automatically checks your balance when you use it and will deny any transaction that there is not enough money for.

I guess that was just a specific piece of technology used by Budget Car Rentals and not many other places? It seems that if every business had such technology this wouldn’t be a problem, at all, ever again. :slight_smile:

19

I understand how all that can be frustrating, but I have a question.

I live in Canada. Here, when you get an ATM card, you can also use it to pay for your purchases. They call that Interac. Do you have something similar in the US?

20

A couple of posters have explained this, above, but I’ll have another go.

The $5,000 car loan is secured by your car. That is, if you default on the car loan, they will take your car away from you. From the bank’s point of view, this a a fairly safe loan.

The check card is different from writing checks. If a merchant accepts your check, and it’s returned, the merchant suffers the loss - not the bank. If the check card purchase overdraws your account, the bank suffers the loss. Although it might appear that there is an instant approval based on your balance, and thus no way to overdraw your account with a check card, that isn’t the case. There are plenty of circumstances in which a purchase might be approved even though there is not enough money to fund it in the checking account.

Finally, the “pre-approved” card offers you get are precisely targetted at people with marginal credit: they have high annual fees, “processing” and “application” fees, and sometimes require a security deposit. It makes perfect sense that you would get these, yet not qualify for a check card.

All this said… yes, you’re doing everything as you should to repair your credit – that is, paying all your bills on time.

I recommend that you request a copy of your credit report, to make sure that the information they have on you is accurate. You may do this at no charge, provided you’ve been denied credit (as you have) within thirty days of your request.

DO NOT use on of the many “credit repair” services advertised on the Internet, or even a “credit monitioring” service - their tactic is typically to offer you a “free credit report” as inducement to sign up with them for a year or more of “credit monitoring” for a fee. It’s not worth it.

Get your credit report simply by writing to the institute that denied your application and asking them the reasons for the denial. Typically, they’ll respond with, “Based on information from…” one of the three major credit reporting agencies.

Then write to that agency, explaining that you’ve been denied credit based on their report and that you would like a copy of your report. They’ll send it to you. Review it carefully. Make sure that all the obligations listed are yours.

Anecdote: I once was denied an American Express card, despite having excellent credit and more than sufficient income. When I wrote to the reporting agency, I discovered that the last line on their report was DECEASED. My father and I had similar names, and after his death, somehow that notation ended up on my report. I asked them to remove it, and subsequently had no trouble with American Express.

  • Rick