I had an account with FCNB / speigel I was making my min. Payments every month on time. I only had to pay $15 a month so it wasn't any big deal. I had a debt of $648 and some change when FCNB filed for bankruptcy. I continued to mail in my payments until the bills stopped coming.
I called speigel about the missing bills and they are the ones that told me that the company had filed bankruptcy and that I needed to get a hold of them for payment information. I mailed in a few more payments to the address I had always mailed it too but I didn't have a bill so I wrote the account number on my check and mailed it in to the address that was on my last statement that I had gotten.
They didn't cash any of my checks that I mailed so I stopped sending them in. About 4 months later they cashed all my checks I had sent and my bills started up again only this time they had charged me late fees for the months that they had held my checks and with those fees charged it caused me to go over the limit. I started to notice that I would get a bill and pay it sometimes the very next day but they would claim it was late so I was not only being charged that $30 over the limit fee but I was now being charged a late fee of $30 too.
I looked on my bill and it didn't even have a due date. I kept up this endless cycle for a few months and then the calls started coming. Sometimes I would get up to 15 calls a day. I would talk to one of them and then 30 min. Later another would call. When I would tell them that I just talked to them they would get hateful and tell me that I DID NOT talk to them and they didn't know who I had just talked to but I needed to get this resolved today!
Even though I had just talked to someone and they told me that I had to get a payment in by a certain time etc. I once after getting 4 callin in a two hour time span, told them I was recording the call (I wasn't but I thought that would bluff them and they would stop calling that day, but I wish I had a recorder to have got him on tape) the guy called me a deadbeat B*tch and hung up on me.
After a while I just stopped answering the phone when "unknown caller" would show up on the ID. I did contact someone from the number printed on the back of my card and asked about the fees, they told me that they couldn't take them off due to the fact that I was indeed late on my last few payments.
I told them that I didn't understand how I could be late when there wasn't a date due on the statement. The girl told me that there was no date due to the fact that I was over the limit so it was due in full when I got my statement. I asked her so if there is no due date how can I be charged these late fee's she told me that a computer does that and they couldn't reverse it. She agreed that it made no sense but her hands were tied.
I told her that I couldn't afford to pay the full balance off at the time and I was getting buried under the $60 fees they were charging me each month. I was paying more then the min. And it wasn't touching the debt not to mention I was getting more debt each month due to the fee's.
Before I knew it my $649 balance was now over a thousand. I just couldn't keep up. I did some research on the internet and found that there were tons of former customers of this company who had the same problem I had with them after they filed bankuptcy and they were getting no where too.
I made one last ditch effort to work something out with this company and they told me they would get back to me on a payment schedule or trying to work something out about the interest and fees ect... I never heard back from them. Now almost two years later I get a letter from a debt collector stating that they are going to take steps to recover the debt of $1649... That is a thousand dollars more then my original debt on the card. Finally to my question...
I am now unemployed due to the lovely cut backs American workers must deal with all the time. We are a one income family and we stretch that buget until it squeeks. We pay our bills every month. We are not perfect and sometimes they fall a week or two behind but the companies have never been rude and they always work with us. To be honest I thought that FCNB had wrote my account off since i never heard from them again. But now this. I am sorry I am straying from the question this just has me so torn up...
My question is. Can they go after my house (we just got this house a few years ago through a low income program) or my husbands check if his name is not on the account or the card or anything that has to do with this account?
I live in Kentucky. I am willing to pay my debt of 649 but I feel it is unfair to pay the $1,000 they charged me due to their lack of cashing my checks and billing me due to their being in the middle of bankruptcy. Do I have any rights to fight this? I can't afford a lawyer and we can't afford for them to go after my husbands check either. I don't know if we have any rights to tell them what we can pay back or not. We only earn $28,000 a year and that is with my husband working all the over time he can he works 50 to 55 hours a week for that 28,000 and I know he couldn't do more then he is already.
I am staying home to take care of our young children since all the jobs I could find were for min. Wage and by the time I paid child care I would be working just to pay the child care and only bring home after taxes like 4 or 5 dollars. It just didn't seem to make sense for us to pay for child care for me to work if we were only going to have enough for a loaf of bread and maybe a gallon of milk after the week was over.
I have been told by the collection agency that we need to get off our lazy butts and find two good paying jobs but we are both just high school grads and that doesn't get you very far these days. We are not on welfare and the tax payers are not paying our way (this was another hateful statement made to me by one of their sweet callers)
I don't have the money to go back to school to try and get a better job and my husband hardly has time to sleep let alone go back to school. This bill is my only worry... Any advice you have on dealing with these people would be a great help. Thank you for your time, A worried mother in KY
J
Owensboro, Kentucky
U.S.A.
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