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If that don't work, and the debt is truly yours, PAY IT. If not it can be sold over and over again and become a very big headache. If you pay it off, it ages and after about 2 years will not affect your score that much. PLUS, I myself have not seen much of a negative FICO drops due to paying off something. I posted about it and no one answered as to why it didn't affect much...so my advice is do pay for delete or pay it. In the LONG run, you will be glad you did.

Well, I can tell you that the worst kind of (how can I politely describe the lower element of society?) have been moving into our extremely expensive apartment complex. How they are affording the rent, I have no idea. I get the idea that in some cases, no members of the household are working. Recently we noticed the changing demographics and we have made a guess that people have been evicted or walked away from their houses. In almost every case, the household consists of a family with school-age children, and those typically have not filled up our complex (we've been living here since 2001 and there are usually a few families with one baby getting ready to buy a house, lots of single or married double-working couples and lots of retirees.) These new neighbors seem to be from a low socioeconomic and educational strata, and to be honest, because we know how to do this, we've looked up the names on the local court case database and have seen long rap sheets including theft, burglary, some personal crimes, traffic violations, and what appears to be bankruptcy or at least strings of bad debts to credit card companies. I can't emphasize enough what an expensive neighborhood this is and how strange it is that people you'd never expect to see on "this side of the tracks" would be moving in here. I wonder if these people are using the "float" (from when they are facing foreclosure till it is reported on their CR) (and from when they stop paying the mortgage so they can save up several grand to get into a new place) to get settled somewhere new, as former homeowners-turned-apartment renters. Why they would move here instead of a less-expensive complex? I don't know, but the hub postulated that maybe it's such a shock for them to go from the relative cushiness of their own house that they didn't want to trade down too low when choosing an apartment home for themselves. One thing I know for sure is that it is not typical (or at least it has not been so far- maybe now it's not unusual) for families with growing kids to move from owned houses to rented apartments. One family, in particular, told me while making idle chitchat that they left a very expensive beach house in CA to move here, and that the move cost them about 6,000 or so. She says the husband works on the computer at home - maybe - I only see him in loungewear and neither of them go out much of anywhere. He looks like he just got out of the penitentiary and the hub remarked (privately) that she looks like she makes her living in the service industry (yeah, I meant SERVICE, that way.) The three other families I can think of also moved from houses, presumably owned. Sorry if I sound like a snob. I'm calling it like I see it. The neighborhood is filling up with little kids talking about who they're going to "kick up" and whose dad is away in prison, and this is not typical for this neighborhood. It's strange, and I wonder if it used to be that anyone who could sign on the dotted line could buy a house, and now those same people are having to settle themselves elsewhere as renters, and chaos is resulting. I'm hoping their wad of cash will run out soon and they'll move somewhere better suited to their apparent means, because we pay a lot to live here and I'd rather not hear "kick him up!" outside my window.