Making progress

I admittedly went a little nuts with spending and credit cards a few years ago

My credit score was way up, every time I applied for a store card or regular credit card, I was approved. It felt good to have so much power in my wallet

What I didn’t take into consideration was even though I make a pretty decent wage, using my credit cards to buy stuff I didn’t need got me in trouble really fast.  Since I had/have every major department store credit line, one that would increase my limit it seemed every 6 months, I would get emails from them, stating, we’ll give you a bag full of travel sized crap, if you spend a certain amount of full sized crap

I apparently needed all of that little crap, as I have designer shopping bags galore, lots of stuff I don’t need and will never run out of travel sized cosmetics and skin care

I finally realized that I couldn’t shop my way to filling up this hole I was trying to fill, and slowly starting assessing the damage. I needed to pay off all these cards and get out of debt, but I couldn’t really pay more than the minimum due. I got some ‘personal loans’, stupid high interest rates, to pay off most of the balances, but some were just too out of reach

It was while applying for one of those loans that they referred me to a debt consolidation organization. I really didn’t want to give up my credit cards but when they told me that even in an emergency I didn’t have enough available credit, among almost all of my major cards, I realized that consolidating them was the right thing to do

Not without some serious pain  mind you. I stopped paying my monthly payments in preparation of this company negotiating the pay off of my accounts.  I would send them a lump sum every month, and they would take care of the rest

Because of my not paying monthly, my credit score took a serious dive. I tried to continue to pay off the other cards that weren’t included in my consolidation and to not use them as much.  The holidays this past year really stretched that effort

One of the companies that I had included in the consolidation was a payday loan sort of personal loan company. I had borrowed a lot of money from them over the years, at a really high interest rate. Like triple digit high.

The company started their negotiations with all the creditors as my deposit account grew every month.  It looked like things were progressing really nicely. One creditor agreed to the settlement, took the payoff in payments to allow my deposit account to grow while paying them and slowly I was seeing they had negotiated with other creditors

This one payday loan one…they weren’t having it.  They ended up suing me. I had to take money from my deposit account to pay for a lawyer, it was a real mess to say the least.  The company kept trying to get me to add money to pay them and their offers and I was like, look, if I had that money I wouldn’t be going through you would I?

Here it is, several months later from when they served me with papers and we finally have a settlement.  In the process, they have shaved off $2000 of my debt.  It will drain my deposit account, and I am looking at starting the process all over again with going through the negotiations for the other creditors, but I won’t have to go to court and face these people

It felt really good to finally say, yes I agree to the settlement offer, after many declines due to lack of funds. I just hope that the process of clearing the rest of them goes by really quickly