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I lost my business after a little over 10 years of hard work. I had been living comfortably on $120,000 or better per year. Unfortunately, I had not saved much of the money and my debt, although not that high for the income level, was higher than it should have been. Some of the debt was personal debt and some of it was a result of purchases for the business. I went to work for someone else at $60,000 per year, and was ok with the payments on my credit cards, but never seemed to be able to apply more than the minimum payment. After 18 months, I quit my job due to a payroll issue. I was 56 years old and could not find an employer that was interested in the skill set I possessed. I have been unemployed for 18 months now, and what little I had in savings has dwindled to nothing. Needless to say, I was behind in all my payments, and the bill collectors were relentless in their efforts to take what little I had left. I was considering filing for bankruptcy when a friend of mine told me about the letter package sold on this website. I thought I should give the Debt Elimination process a try first. What did I have to lose. Within a week of filing the letters with my creditors from Option One, the phone calls dropped to less than half of what they were the previous week. Not one of the creditors had answered the certified letters I had mailed out. A month later, I removed $51,000 worth of debt. Five Years Later... Had I kept going the way I was headed, it would have cost me another $125,000.00 over the last five years and I would not be any closer to getting the debt paid off. Instead, I am completely debt free. And, we are past the Statute of Limitations (4 years in Florida) on all accounts. Yes, my credit score did go down, and yes, we got it back up to 730 using some credit repair techniques. In two more years, the rest of the negative info on my credit report will be gone. I'm not going to lie. We have hit some rough patches in the last five years, but we have made it through without credit and I hope I will never need to use it again.
Seven Years Later...
Those Items that we were not able to clear from our credit report are now going away based on the 7 year limit for reporting credit deficiencies. Both mine and my wife's scores are good. The only reason they are not higher is that the IRS has filed a lien against us for money that we don't owe. I will get that straightened out soon. The IRS has estimated our income without taking into account expenses and business losses from when we closed the business. In my wife's case, they filed two liens, one for filing single and the other for filing jointly, even though they are both for the same years.
After I get the tax liens removed, both of our credit scores will be around 800.
D. S., Jacksonville, FL
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