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When Paying Your Bills Can Hurt Your Credit
By JLP | April 14, 2006
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I saw the article When Paying Bills Can Hurt Your Credit by Liz Pulliam-Weston a while back and forgot about it until I saw it mentioned by the BudgetingBabe.
There’s something about this article that doesn’t sit well with me. It is almost as if Liz is telling people NOT to pay off their bills (at least the old bills). Personally, my belief is that if YOU are responsible for the bill, then YOU should pay it off, regardless of the consequences. If you don’t pay if off, guess who will? Sure, the company will “write it off.” However, the company must raise the price for everyone else to cover the bad debt.
Of course, the credit scoring system needs to be fixed if it penalizes people who pay off old debts. It should be the other way around: people WITH old debts should be penalized until they are paid off.
Topics: Credit | 2 Comments »
April 16th, 2006 at 12:01 pm
From the article:
“In the end, you may decide that trying to pay off your old accounts isn’t worth the hassle — or you may decide just the opposite. You may decide the ethical obligation to pay what you owe outweighs any short-term concerns you have about your credit.”
I think the preferred, ethical choice is to contact the original creditor and offer to pay off the debt, in exchange for their agreeing to delete it from your report whenever possible — much of the unfairness for debtors results from unsavory promises made by collectors that end up unfulfilled, even after promised payments are made…
April 16th, 2006 at 8:46 pm
Weekly Roundup – 04/14/06
Once again, I’ve managed to let my Friday roundup to slip until Sunday, but here it is just the same… A ragtag bunch of eye-catching articles from across the MoneyBlogNetwork and beyond…
FMF at FreeMoneyFinance advises us to save mo…