First, I would like to thank you for taking the time to read my post and I would greatly appreciate any advice that you can offer.
Making a very long story short ... Several months ago my mother experienced a near-fatal brain injury from a fall that she sustained. This accident occurred over 500 miles away from our homes, while she was on vacation. Going into her second month in the trama unit my stepfather informed me that this was more than he could deal with and essentially abandoned her. Due to this, I was left as her sole caregiver and had to make multiple extended stay trips to be with her. It wasn't until going into the ninth month before I was able to get her transferred back to our home area, During this time I experienced financial hardships due to the strain this accident brought to both my mother and me. While I struggled to make the minimum payments on my credit cards, I tried to play the system and would only make partial payments to PayPal, due to the fact that at the time I was aware they were not yet repeating to credit agencies. While still continuing to pay my bills in this manner PayPal/Synchrony started reporting activity to monitoring agencies. I was made aware of this due to an alert that I received from CreditWise while I was out of state with her. This occurred while I was in the process of cashing out my 401K in order to pay off a large majority of my debt, however, I was unable to do so before the negativity reports hit my credit file. Once Synchrony started posted previous monthly activity I have a 30, 60, 90-day late payment, again due to the fact that I was only making partial payments, as an example, the monthly payment was $150 and I would only pay $75.00. During this time I also ran all of my credit cards to the max due to needing to use credit for hotel stays, gas, food, etc. Due to a high credit usage ratio, my credit score took a hard hit. Then once these late payments hit my report my score dropped an additional 85 points, to somewhere around 580. Since then I have paid off PayPal/Synchrony and made huge strides in paying off the others, my overall debt ratio is now below 25%. Also, my score has now gone back up and is currently at 647.
I now have my mother in a nursing home back in our home area and while life will never be the same for her/us, things are much better.
What advice can you give me on taking care of these 30, 60, 90-day late payments? I apologize for my lack of knowledge, however, I've read a little about goodwill letters however, I am unsure. Any assistance you can provide will be greatly appreciated, as I will soon try and buy a house that will be handicap accessible with the hopes of someday having her stay with me from time-to-time just to give her somewhat of what she lost due to the accident.
Again, thank you for taking the time to read my post,
GBC1969
