Well in talking settlements, it's all different. We have high averages in our office cause we go for PIF in 6 payments or 60% in a 30 day time frame no other choice unless you're a hardship. First person to name a number loses. BE SUPER NICE TO THEM. They may have harrased you in the past and you blew up on them but BE NICE and if they sound cheesey or sound like they made something up, go with it. Wait for them to call you, be depressed like there is no silver lining, economy sucks, you owe everyone and their mom, still paying for funeral costs of a family member and the funeral director lets you make $30 payments a month whenever you can. Write down your hardship so you always have your story straight. Apologize for not paying and if you yelled at them in the past, apologize for that too. = less than 40% settlement. Be ready to pay it if you like it. Get the stipulation agreement emailed/faxed and set up a pay for a couple days later so you can "raise the money".
DO NOT PROVIDE YOUR CREDIT CARD/CHECK BY PHONE INFORMATION. HOWEVER, if you don't provide payment information they wont want to work with you cause it's a waste of time to help you out when you're bitching about seeing something in writing first(think backwards for a second here). Go to walmart and get a Walmart Money Card for $3. You'll need to load it with $20 that you can use at ur leisure. Activate the card and in 5-7 business days you'll get your permanent card. GET THIS PERMANENT CARD BEFORE YOU EVEN BEGIN TALKING TO THEM. Tell them its what you use to pay all your bills as opposed to some card that was laying around that you had from 2 years ago. Set a pay date, go to walmart before that date, load the money.
As far as finding you...
We use skip tracing to find people's relatives/associates and then ask them for your info. 5/20 times your credit report contains your current job. We also pull your Innovis credit report to get your new phone numbers. I did it on myself to see how fast it worked since I just got a new phone number and 3 days later it was already available for all. Rarely, RARELY do we ever have the original number.
Starting Score: 06/2011 505 EX 523 Lender Pulled