Communicating with Creditors

by an anonymous member of Debtors Anonymous

This recovery story is made available by a member of DA under two conditions: (1) no name is attached, and (2) nobody makes any money off it. Feel free to read it for your own inspiration, and for that of your own local DA group.

Regarding communicating with creditors, we need to determine our responses based on our recovery needs. They have their needs and we have ours. It really isn't their job to take care of ours, so we have to do it for ourselves. If we do send more than we can reasonably send, we set ourselves up for a fall later on. So being clearheaded during this process is better for us in the long run.

But I do worry about us projecting personalities on creditors. If we're talking about a credit card company or other business, it is a business -- not a person. Yeah, we talk to people who respresent that company. But the inflexibility is not about a person being inflexible as much as it is a business which sets certain procedures about how they handle things.

So that inflexibility/lack of compromise is more likely the influence of a procedure manual stating that if bills go past a certain amount due, certain percentage not paid, certain number of days late... that they go to collections. That's just the procedure. Usually the people we talk to at the creditor company don't have the flexibility to change a procedure manual after a certain length of time if the procedures aren't followed. And they just have to let the thing go into collections. Now, maybe these people are also obnoxious people who like to act morally superior to us while they inform us of these procedures. But often they are just speaking the rules and we want them to be what they can not be. So we project that "firstbank VISA" or "citibank Mastercard" has the personality of our mean father, or ex spouse, a teacher we hated, the leutenant we had to answer to once, etc. And sometimes those projections are based on our own addictive hotbuttons and not really part of the creditor. The creditor in most cases is a business. Boring, vanilla, business. Doin' their business how they always do it. And they have to have customers that are happy enough to keep working with them or they will eventually go out of business.

That said, once things go into collections the personalities change. Now we're dealing with companies again, but companies whose business is to go after money that theoretically is lost/uncollectable. So they do what they can to get what they can. Collection agents in this scenario often are paid a percentage of what they collect. (I knew a collection agent once, and he got 10% of his payments.) If they don't collect, they don't eat. So they have a certain amount of push, either from desperation to feed their families or a kind of goal-oriented competition inside which pushes them to get more, more more.

Even then, each of these people at the collection agency are people representing a company. They are given more leeway on what they can do for you/say to you by their company, and some abused this freedom so there are laws constraining them from certain behaviors. Some of them choose to see the debtors they collect from as non-persons so they can achieve their goals more easily. However, remember that they deal with money addicts every day and most of those addicts are not in recovery... promising and not following through, lying, etc. So when they deal with us they expect us in the same vein. And if they see us as an object rather than a person.... and an object who probably will try to lie to them, then they are not starting out any conversation ready to see an honest and vulnerable debtor trying to do their best.

I think it does help to see that the person you are talking to is a person with biases and needs, and that they represent a company which does not have much of a personality but has a procedure manual. I think that we debtors often attribute the disagreeable feelings we get during conversations with creditors/collection agents to the creditor company, and that this tendency really muddies the waters. Maybe these people have jobs we don't respect, but they are doing their jobs.

I once taught computer skills to a roomful of collectors at a regional bank. They really enjoyed each other and liked their jobs OK. They couldn't understand why someone would buy a car and then not pay for it as they had agreed to do. They didn't like having to repossess(sp) cars as it was a major pain for the bank when things got to that point... but they saw it as fair. Someone didn't pay for what they were using. They had something of large value that they didn't have rights to because they didn't follow their loan agreement and for whatever reason weren't able or willing to work things out. So the bank had to do what they could to not lose money on the deal. These were real human people with a sense of fairness, and if their customers weren't being fair in their legal agreements, they did what must be done to make it more fair. I never had situations that got this bad but it helped me to see these people, particularly over coffee and donuts on a Saturday morning, learning Windows95 so they could track their work better on the new computer system. Normal people who had normal lives. Who did a job, in their minds, with integrity. Making things as fair as they could. Really.

I guess this is a hot button for me, 'cause I used to date a guy who would go nuts at a 24-hour pharmacy-- that a plastic comb cost him $2 when he just knew it cost $0.35 to make. Never mind that the store was open 24 hours and had to pay people to be there when he wanted them there. Never mind that the comb had to be manufactured, packaged, put in boxes, shipped to wherever, unloaded, stocked and priced, ready for him to buy it at 2am. So it cost $2. It didn't bug me but he felt abused by the store as if it were an abusive parent or Big Brother. You get the point. There are costs of doing business and if a business doesn't balance it all right, they disappear. And all those people who worked at that business don't have their jobs anymore.

We have enough emotional garbage as debtors/addicts to deal with every day in our recovery. It seems that freeing ourselves of projecting evil or cruel personalities on non-personal businesses might be helpful. It sure helped me when I was dealing with creditors to know that the representative I dealt with was a person, not a company.

One personal example: about 4-5 years ago I was ordered by the doctor to not speak for 30 days. I was a computer instructor on "on call" status so I didn't get paid for that time I couldn't work. After I could speak again I could only teach 2 non-consecutive days a week for a few weeks, then only 3 non-consecutive days, etc... so my income was sharply decreased for many months. I did what I could to create income... had a "rent party" where I created jewelry and asked people to buy it from me so I could pay the mortgage. Washed walls and moved furniture for people at my church which is NOT my style but anyone who wanted to pay me to do non-talking work I worked for.

During that time I had a friend at work call a few creditors for me and explain the situation to them. I got behind but I stayed in touch. I called the same contact person every time I called the long distance company and the mortgage company. I touched base every month, telling them when the payment would be there, how much I was paying, etc. I was out of work during February and it took me until June to get caught up. By the end of all this, I would call and they would know me. The last time I called to say all was A-OK they wished me well and sorta said goodbye. I mean, I used to joke that I was on a first-name basis with my creditors. But it was true.... I'd call and they would say "Hi, Grrrl, how is your voice doing these days?" So when we said goodbye it was kinda sad 'cause I liked talking to them. But great 'cause I was back on the road to recovery, both voice and financial.

Of course, some of us have creditors who are people we know. Our friend, parent, co-worker, landlord who shares the same duplex, etc... and of course these credit situations have a different feel to them. We still need to be clear about our needs but we are more clear about the person involved. They may or may not be a business. They are no more or less a creditor to us, but certainly more personal.

And that is my (again long) opinion. Take what you like and leave the rest.