@Anonymous wrote:First , thank you for your service to our country. I am not an attorney nor really an expert but I have read a ton on credit and rights over the past months that I have been working to rebuild. You have some real advantages in this situation, of course your protection from repossesion is the biggest. I would not borrow money to pay off this debt, the damage is really already done to your credit, paying them off in full will not make the damage go away. You can call them and negotiate a reduced amount in return for them showing the debt settled but you need to know that you run the risk of prolonging the time that this shows on your credit report because if you start making payments on the debt and then stop due to a hardship you reset your 6 years and 6 months of DOFD. It can't hurt to call but I would not commit to anything until you have a chance to reflect, they have already charged off the balance due and are not repossessing. When I served the protection I had against creditors only applied while I was depolyed for desert storm, not sure if that is true still but you certainly don't want to give them any information that would trigger the removal of that protection. This may be a case worthy of spending 100 bucks or so for a legal consult if you can't find a free legal aid office to help you. I am kind of thinking outloud as I am typing here but I think I would seek legal advice before doing anything. No sense in causing a new problem trying to resolve an old one.
Make sure you pull your credit report and work on any issues you can to bump your score up, you need a couple of credit cards even if they are secured, NFCU is excellent to deal with so you might want to consider them. You have three years since the charge off so you should be able to recover your scores to the mid 600's if you clean a few things up and have some good trade lines.
Let us know how this goes
UPDATE!!!!
Ok so its been a little over a month since I last posted and I have some great news. About 2 weeks after my initial post I Called Capital One's SCRA
(Service Members Civil Relief Act) department to make a payment.Before I could get the words out of what I was going to pay the agent on the phone said "well sir, hold on". So I said "what it is? Please tell me you see there is something you can offer me" and he said "actually sir, if you can make a good faith payment right now we can get you into our B.A.T.O. program". I said "what's that!?" and he said "Well it stands for Better Alternative Than Others and if your account gets approved we'll lower your interest rate again, move your late payments to the end of the loan and bring your account current and update your credit report like this never happened......Would you be interested in doing that? Could you make a good faith payment today? I damn near jumped out of my seat andh quickly said "Hell yes!!!".
So I made the payment and about 3 days later I received an email with a Loan modification application. I filled it out and last week it got approved and Capital One overnighted a letter congratulating me and providing me the terms of the new offer. It showed my new payment which went from 394.00 to 255.00, my interest rate dropped to 0%. All the penalties, late fees and interest were elminated and all I had to do was sign it and send it back in the provided fedex epress envelope. Well, that was a no brainer so I did it on Saturday and according to the tracking number the agent handling my account should receive it this afternoon. My first payment under the new term is Due June 1st. I honestly couldnt be happer. I will never get into this situation again, EVER! I can't wait to see what the change to my credit score will be but I'm sure will will be quite dramatic. Thanks for your input and the advice.
Starting Score: 549
