Tuesday, August 19, 2003

 

I am part of a class action lawsuit! Am I excited? You bet!
When I went and checked my mail at my post office box, I received a notice from a law firm. I wondered why a law firm would be contacting me. The last time I dealt with a lawyer was when I went through a divorce almost 8 years ago. Honest, no lawyers since, and no trouble with the law either, not even a parking ticket, nothing, I swear! I opened the envelope and found I was named as part of a class action lawsuit against the big 3 credit reporting agencies. To backtrack a bit for some history... Several months back, I was shuffling my credit cards, getting rid of ones which would not give me a break on the interest rate and yearly fees and replacing them with ones with no fees and lower interest. I was turned down by one I applied for, based on bankruptcy! My credit is excellent, no late payments anywhere, nothing negative, and I certainly never applied for protection from creditors using bankruptcy! Since I was turned down, I had the opportunity to get a copy of my credit report at no cost to me. I contacted the agency who supplied the report and got a copy. Sure enough, there was an entry about backruptcy! The only problem was that it wasn't me, it was my ex-wife who filed, and it happened several years after we divorced. I made a number of calls and found out that there was no record anywhere of the divorce in my credit report, so I was able to get the account in question to file a change to my credit report about the divorce and me not being responsible even though my name had been on my ex-wife's account as another card holder. I had bought down my mortgage and refinanced the remainder and my mortgage company had received a copy of my credit report and when I contacted them, they had read it correctly, that it was not my debt, and had gone ahead with the refinance. It took me a couple of months on the phone and by letter to get my report cleaned up from this mess. I am not certain I was completely successful, but I will find out. This class action lawsuit is about this exact problem, a bankruptcy being misreported in a credit report because of a shared account which existed after a divorce and one person later filing for bankruptcy. It is hard to take apart a marriage. I know, as I have done it twice in my lifetime. Many things are shared, like bank accounts and credit card accounts. I was careful and I got almost every one we shared, at least the ones which were in my name with her name as a 2nd card holder. What I had no control over were the accounts she had in her name which also had my name as a 2nd card holder. A card for a 2nd person is easy to overlook, and my ex-wife neglected to remove my name, and then 5 years later, when she filed for bankruptcy, it got into my credit history because of my name still being on her account on which she defaulted. The credit reporting agencies do not keep track of a divorce, and this lawsuit is to do 2 things, fix the reports of those of us affected by their lack of attention to detail, and to make them not make this mistake of omission in the future for others. I get no cash benefit, just the fixing of my credit report, which they estimate is worth about $150 or so, which includes getting free copies of my report from all 3 of the agencies now, and again after the fix is made, maybe 6 months from now when the suit will be settled in the courts. Wow, something good is happening to me, yet again, after something which wasn't quite so bad. After all, my mortgage company saw no problem, it was the credit card company which read the entry and made the mistake in denying me a credit card based on this single entry on an account which was not mine, after we were divorced. Take a lesson here, from my experience, that if you are divorced as I am, and your ex files for bankruptcy or even does something which affects their credit after the fact, it could be tied to you through some account you overlooked, or had no control over.

Posted by: Rowlfe - at: 8/19/2003 04:15:00 PM

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