“Learn What to Do, Who to Call, and How to Raise Your Credit Score Hundreds of Points Just Like I Did”

Good credit is really important. Not only does it help you get good financing for a new house or a new car, it also represents your financial character to the world.

When a potential employer or landlord sees your credit report, you want it to tell them only good things. You don’t want them to see a bunch of black marks and a terrible, low credit score that characterizes you as a person who can’t manage money or keep up your end of a financial agreement.

I didn’t really understand the importance of good credit until I lost mine. I was fresh out of school and looking for work. I opened a few credit cards to help me handle the expenses of moving out and setting up my own place.

I was totally unprepared for the realities of life on my own, and I ended up spending more than I had expected and burning through my savings in no time. By the time I finally found a job, I had some serious debts piled up.

After some disagreements with the credit card companies about how much interest I should pay, I got frustrated and stopped paying on my cards at all. It was just too demoralizing to make the minimum payments and yet see my balance swell with interest every month. I cut up my credit cards and put them out of my mind.

I lived on a cash-only budget for quite a while, and didn’t think about my credit at all. Then I decided I needed a new car. When I went to the dealership, they ran my credit report to see if I qualified for financing. Well, guess what. I didn’t qualify.

My score was barely 500. In retrospect, this seems obvious. However, at the time I was honestly so oblivious to what was going on with my credit score that I was truly shocked. I fled from the dealership, extremely embarrassed.

In the privacy of my room, I looked over my credit report again and tried to puzzle out what all of these “collection items” were. I also saw something called a “civil judgment”. I did some research and learned that a collection item comes from a bad debt, and a civil judgment or credit judgment comes from a debt collector taking you to court and winning a judgment against you.

I realized that these black marks must have come from those old overdue credit cards I’d cut up years ago.

Apparently, the credit card companies had sold my accounts to a company called World Financial Network National Bank, or WFNNB.

I don’t know why I hadn’t realized this sooner. I had moved several times since having my credit card problems, so maybe they had sent notices that had been lost in the mail, or maybe I’d just thrown out the letters because I’d never heard of WFNNB and assumed they were sending me junk mail.

Somehow, WFNNB suddenly got a hold of my phone number. They started calling my every day, demanding that I repay those old credit card debts. It was pretty upsetting. I thought those bad times were behind me, but now my old mistakes had caught up with me and it seemed I would have to pay.

The WFNNB representative tried to convince me that he was just looking out for my best interests, and offered what he termed a “generous” repayment plan. It didn’t seem generous to me!

Sure, the monthly payments were low, but the interest was high, and if I agreed to that plan it would take years to pay off the balance.

Since WFNNB had already reported my debts to the collection agencies and ruined my credit, I didn’t feel like I had any incentive to pay them. After all, what else could they do to me?

I tried this argument out on the debt collector who kept calling me. He said that because they had already secured a credit judgment against me, they could get permission to take legal actions against me in order to secure repayment on the loan.

He said they might petition to seize my assets and auction them off in order to repay the debt, place liens on my home or property and then force me to sell and turn over the proceeds to WFNNB, or garnish my wages until the debt was repaid.

I didn’t own any property, and had no assets to speak of, so the wage garnishment threat was the only one that really resonated with me.

I freaked out a little, and for the first time I seriously considered giving in and paying on these old debts. I’m really glad I didn’t though! Turns out, my debts were actually so old that the statute of limitations on them had already expired.

If I had made a payment, it could have restarted the statute of limitations, and then I would have been legally responsible for the debts again.

I knew I needed to resolve things with WFNNB so that my credit could get repaired and I could do normal adult things, like get financing for a new car or move to a new apartment. I had tried reasoning with WFNNB and gotten nowhere.

I decided to give things one more try by hiring professional help. If that didn’t work, I fantasized that I could just change my name and move to Belize.

I looked up credit repair law firms on the web and discovered Lexington Law. What I read seemed really promising.

The firm had been around since 1991, and in that time they had removed tons and tons of collection items and other black marks from their clients’ credit reports. In fact, in just one year they removed over one million items!

I read a few testimonials from people who had been helped by Lexington Law, and then I gave them a call. During my free consultation, the Lexington Law rep was friendly and professional.

Unlike the WFNNB reps I’d spoken to, she had my interests in mind, rather than her own or her company’s. She advised me that credit repair isn’t magic, and you need to have a good case against the debt collector in order to engage the services of Lexington Law.

When I told her my story, she zeroed in on the age of the original credit card debts. That would form the cornerstone of the case, she thought. If those debts turned out to be expired, then everything WFNNB had done to try to collect on them was illegal.

If I hired Lexington Law, they would find out the statute of limitations for credit card debt in my state, and see whether or not my debts had expired. Since debt collectors are not allowed to seek repayment of expired debts, it would be easy to get the collection items removed from my credit report under the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

Lexington Law would also investigate the circumstances of the credit judgment that WFNNB had gotten against me. We needed to figure out why I hadn’t had any idea that the court case had taken place.

If WFNNB had failed to properly serve me the summons, we could get the judgment reversed and removed from my credit report.

I liked what I was hearing, so I went ahead and hired Lexington Law. True to their word, they went to bat for me right away. I started looking through my mail more carefully, because I was waiting for new letters from the credit bureaus. Within a month or so, I received notices from all three credit bureaus proving that Lexington Law had successfully removed the collection items and the credit judgment.

I could not have been happier. It felt so good to realize that a few stupid mistakes made when I was a naive college grad hadn’t ruined my whole life after all. Now that the collection items and the credit judgment were erased, my credit score began to recover. Eventually I was able to go back to that car dealership with a clean credit report and a sold credit score, and drive away in a brand new truck.

When I say Lexington Law changed my life, I’m not exaggerating! They taught me about my rights as a consumer, repaired my credit, and set me on the path to being a more financially responsible person. Now, rather than being on a cash-only budget and at the mercy of debt collectors, I’m building good credit through my new auto loan.

If you are having trouble with debt collectors who have ruined your credit, give Lexington Law a call. You’ve got nothing to lose, and everything to gain!