Collection Deleted Early - Pay For Delete Working.

[GucciMark]

I am soooooo happy.....

I just negotiated a PFD (PAY FOR DELETE ) with a national cell phone company.....

Want to know what I did? .... read on.

Preamble..

I changed my cell contract prematurely due to coverage issues, basically I was getting cut off all the time, or there was no coverage at all,.... it was costing my business money so I switched services before the 2 year contract was up and of course there was a penalty of about $200... I failed to pay the penalty because at the time I felt that they had already cost me enough money and now they want more, "Hell no" I was upset and made a stupid decision....anyway... it went to collections and has been on my CR ever since.... fast forward 3 years, to now.

After many failed attempts recently (3) at trying to negotiate a PFD with the 'in-house' collection dept. I decided to by pass the collection dept and write a very "nice nice" letter to the CEO of the Company asking for total forgiveness on the account.

I explained why I left the company ( because of terrible coverage and it was costing my business money to keep their service, yada yada yada,)

They called me back within a week of sending the letter. I was very nice to the person who called me...and I further explained that paying an old collection would actually drop my FICO score because negative accounts like this have less impact over time, especially 3 years old accounts, and if I pay it today and you mark it as Paid, then the DOLA would be 'today', making it a 'current' account and that I would be 'dinged' the full negative value for another 2 full years... thus I was requesting (nicely) a PFD.....

....... and they agreed to do a Pay For Delete (PFD) with all the 3 CRA's.

Before paying them, I explained that I have done a lot of reading on the topic of repairing credit and that I would like our agreement in writing, fax or e-mail, and they obliged.

Anyway, the lesson I learned from this was:

1. STAY CALM, getting upset works against you.

2. ALWAYS BE NICE, Anyone will be more flexible with nice people than with jackasses.- they hold the cards, they know it, so it's silly to try to get tough or angry with them.

3. DON'T ACCEPT THE FIRST "NO".

4. DON"T BE IN A RUSH, relax, this may take some time, soooo be cool.

5. HAVE A GOOD REASON why you did what you did, surely it's not just because, "Ahhh, I didn't feel paying you, screw you"- if that's the case you deserve bad credit. So you have to give them a good reason why you did what you did.

and

6. GO TO THE TOP as a last resort, almost always there is a head person that is distanced from the collection 'gutter' and you can appeal to him/her. Again, go to the top person only as a last resort, otherwise he/she will be bombarded with letters and your case will be diluted and thus, will less likely be approved. To get to the General you first have to go thru the chain of command.

Has anyone else had a similar response? What are other PFD stories?

[hiblues]

Hi everyone...

I'm here in Hawaii...

80 degrees and lovin it.

I graduated from the UHK / Credit Repair being my major - hehe-

UHK=University of Hard Knocks - just a little joke there....

Regarding the above....

I've done similar things with a CA, I think patience is a must.

I was told several times, "we don't do that"

and after several months had passed, and finally talking to the supervisor, I

finally was able to have the items PFD.

I was told by a CA ( so it may be BS) they have made agreements with the CRA something like, "you agree to only report accurate information"

so PFD would could be a violation to the alleged "contract".

Also, I just read another post on here where a girl had collections, but paid the OC instead, then she sent the CRA a letter telling them that the CA wasn't involved, saying, here are copies of the checks to the OC, the item is paid in full and the Collection Trade-Line should be deleted.. and according to her 3 CA items were removed...

Has anyone else tried that? Could it really be that simple?