I had great credit until my divorce 7 years ago. My ex fought the divorce and ended up costing me a fortune in legal fees. During this time I ended up using credit to survive. I also lost my job about 5 months later and it was a true financial disaster. I ran up debt and couldn't pay and became a person I never believed I would. Fast forward several years and I have a bunch of negative history on my credit as well as collection activity. I think my last score was around 590. On top of all that, I have a substantial federal tax lien that came in late last year. The bankruptcy thing I never considered as I truly thought I would be able to one day dig myself out of this mess.
Now, things are starting to look up financially and I have a job where I have been able to put money aside and have hired a firm to work on the tax lien issue and try to settle that for me. I seriously want to rebuild my credit and don't know where to start. The problem that I have is I have several accounts that were written off by the original lender and have collection accounts for many of those as well. It has been so long since this started that I really don't receive any documents anymore from even collection agencies. All the information I have about the debts are what is listed on my credit reports.
My question is two-fold. Is it best to try to negotiate with the collection agencies at this point or since the debt is so old (4-6 years) that I should just wait it out? I really hate not paying back money but is it going to make my credit worse by revisiting the issue now? I am not sure how to do it even as the accounts have been sold over and over. I also wasn't sure if I should just hold off on all that until after the tax lien issue has been resolved? I don't mind having a payment plan for the IRS but want to get both the lien and the credit issues resolved as quickly as possible.
Any advice would be appreciated. Thank you so much!
