Hi all,
I’m keen to hear if anyone has had experiences with companies that offer to fix your credit rating?
We’re doing a bit of research into these companies at Consumer Action Law Centre - so we’d love to hear your thoughts.
-JB
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Ooh - sounds like an interesting report! I can’t wait to find out more!
I haven’t had experience with this - but I saw @michelle @barca1au @meltam @foster.desiree talking about their experiences with credit cards and banks in another thread. Have you guys had any experience with Credit Repair companies?
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I have had experience from a creditors point of view a customer we had to take to court to get paid was using one of these firms to try and get the judgement removed from their credit record, many harassing phone calls and threats were received until we reported the matter to police. My experience has been that if you are slack with your credit recoveries the word soon gets around.
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Yes, we’ve heard a lot from debt collection agencies about their staff being harassed - attempting to get them to drop legitimate debt collection.
But also cases where people have paid huge amounts of money for very little assistance with their problems at all.
There appears to be a loose confederation of non-payers, go slack on the collection and you will soon pick up a new class of customer that have no intention of paying.
Sorry for the misunderstanding Rachel, we have not had any bad credit card experiences. I was merely pointing out that we, the customers, need to be very savvy in dealing with the credit card companies and even the banks. Make sure that these financial institutions meet your needs and don’t pay them any of your hard-earned money unnecessarily. Also, make sure that you keep a good check on all credit card dockets and settle any monies owing at the end of the pay-period. By using credit cards, to your advantage, rather than debit cards, you can use the banks money, interest-free, for an entire month, whilst making sure that you do earn some interest on your working account, if and where possible.
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Rachelbee, my only experience with credit companies has been when they were chasing up money I didn’t owe them for debts not in my name - and mainly one: Baycorp. They don’t seem to care who they get their money from and if the address matches, then near enough is good enough. From what I have heard, which is anecdotal, credit repair companies are probably in the same class of integrity. You can get help from a couple of government agencies as well as the Financial Services Ombudsman if you have lost your rating because of a mistake a credit collection agency has made. Local neighbourhood legal agencies can help as well, we don’t have too many of these in Adelaide but I gather they are very active in NSW in particular and generally cover this area, particularly problems with payday lenders so they can give specific advice. I would be very wary of anyone who wants money to repair your rating!
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There’s now a not for profit centre in SA that can help with these types of issues: http://consumercreditsa.org/
They can help on problems with credit repair companies, debt collectors and the like!
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