When Your Business Need Debt Recovery
February 18, 2009 by Dunkin
Large businesses often have debt recovery departments or outsource it. But the smaller businesses are the ones that have little means of getting business debt recovery. They can’t afford to sell debt, outsource it, or have an entire in-house debt department. But if they don’t get help with debt problems they may never recover on debt.
It takes a special personality to push people with their own problems and plenty of excuses to pay what they owe. These people have to be socially capable enough to motivate people, yet they have personality traits that people don’t look for in their friends. This rare breed of person can collect money owed to the small business. This person must be able to balance forcefulness with the appearance of professionalism. For the small business owner, everything runs on a small budget. If a few customers fail to pay their bills, the small business owner may be unable to pay his or her bills. While a larger company can predict, absorb, and write off bad debt, a small business owner doesn’t have many resources to fall back on when bad debt mounts.
It is important for the small business owner to understand the reasons why people haven’t been paying their bills. In some businesses someone has to extend credit to survive, and in other business a cash basis is expected. If a small business owner must extend credit, it will be necessary from time to time to have someone available who can succeed in debt recovery or the small business will fail.
If your business debt recovery person is good, he or she will be able to negotiate people into payment plans or reduced payments in order to collect money. This may cut into your profits, in addition to what you have to pay the person, but it is better than receiving nothing at all. To avoid having too much customer with unpaid bills the need to accept credit cards could be helpful. The difference between having a successful small business and having no business at all could be the ability to at least collect something from your deadbeat customers.
Dispute the 2007 debt as "Not Mine". If they leave it on, you have every right to sue under the FCRA for reporting incorrect information. The only way you can have it show twice is IF it shows once as the original creditor, and once as collection agency, that is it.
This 2001 being "reopened" in 2007 is the collection agency or creditor trying to reage the debt so that they can try to collect it until 2014 (7years).
If the last activity was 2001, then it is supposed to go off your record this year. If 2004, then it will disappear in 2011. Hope that helps
Edit: I did a quick search on RJM Acquisitions after you posted the name. This company seems to have a habit of claiming they are the creditor rather than as a collection agency. If they are reporting your account as a CREDITOR then no, they cannot legally do that.
What I meant above is that say you have a delinquent credit card,a nd the hire a collection agency. On your credit report you would see the Credit Card account under "accounts" and the collection agency under "Collections". Yes this is legal.
What these guys are doing is definitely NOT legal. Look at this link and click the 2nd link as well as the CreditBoards links. It seems what they do is purchase old debts and try to collect way past the statute of limitations (in other words they probably pay pennies on the dollar, if even that).
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22RJM+Acquisitions%22