What should we do?
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What should we do?
| Sat, 06-25-2005 - 8:58am |
Things are just so bad - we are getting behind on everything and then I had a copy of my credit report pulled and was very surprised to see that Discover had it listed on my credit report that the account was past due. It is past due - but it is not in my name -it is in my husband's name - it is not suppose to be a joint account - just in his name with my name as an added user. In this case is it suppose to be reported against me? I wasn't sure if I should send in the form to the credit bureau stating that it was wrong or not - but I knew that someone on this board would know. How do you ever, ever, ever get ahead when you have credit cards that keep adding over limit fees, and late fees every month? Right now three credit cards are that way. And then we have several more also....that we are barely making the minimum payment on...so I am expecting the same to happen on them because they are maxed out. Husbands income is so VARIED he gets paid weekly but it could be anywhere from $200.00 bring home a week to $600.00 bring home a week and when you are living paycheck to paycheck that is a very hard way to figure out how to pay bills. I called Consumer Crediting a while back - but they said that our bills were more than our income.....of course that was at a time that my husband was out of work for several weeks. They would probably say the same thing now....I would really like to be able to work it out on my own though....how do you ever get to the point you can snowflake if you can't even get to the point of ever catching up. A month or so ago I cashed in my 401k from a previous job - it was close to $6500.00 after taxes .... you would think that would have caught us up and paid alot more...but it didn't after paying the past due things and all we are back to the same situation....what should we do??

If you are an authorized user, they ususally do report it on your bureau. If you want it off your report then have yourself removed as an authorized user. Usually this fact helps people, say if you have no credit and your spouse or a parent puts you on as an authorized user of their card, that can help you. But if the card is past due then it hurts you. Since you are not legally on the hook for the debt, you can have yourself removed at any time.
I think the only way out of this mess (I was in it up to my eyeballs before too) is to find ways to cut your living expenses and every extra dollar you find you pay it to the credit cards. Your first goal should be to get each card to be a couple hundred under the limit and then not use them at all. Once they are safely under the limit, then you will stop getting all those fees and charges that kill you. At that point you can pick one card and focus on paying all you can towards it to eliminate it. Once the first card is eliminated (usually eliminating the lowest balance is easier and faster) you can take the payment you were making to that card and focus on the next card you want to eliminate. Eventually you get to the point where you've made enough progress, you start getting offers for better interest rates (or zero interest rates) and if there are no balance transfer fees or fine print that makes it a bad deal, you can move some credit card debt around and significantly reduce the amount of interest you are paying. Less interest means you get out of debt faster.
If you are trying to get out of debt while still charging on your cards, or when your living expenses are not under control, you will never make any progress. The good news is that if you can get to the point you aren't getting over the limit charges and late fees, you are automatically going to have more money to work with because you will be throwing less of it away every month.
What a tough situation.