triviageek

That fraudulent credit card company had already ruined my credit history. No other lender was going to advance me anything to pay off the bill. Of course that was what that credit card company wanted. They wanted me to be a slave to them forever paying and paying in a futile attempt to pay off an unmanageable debt. And falling deeper and deeper in debt each year.

Somehow I managed to pay off $3000 of that debt. I'm not sure how I did that nearly unimaginable feat. I know I applied all of my tax refund to the bill, but that wouldn't account for all of it. Anyhow that still left me $9000 in debt and still with that dishonest company.

Against the advice of others I secured a loan from the most honest lender available -- ME!!! I had opened an optional 401k sometime earlier and made some minimum contributions. My employer had as part of their personnel department someone who arranged loans from employees 401k plans and I took advantage of that service.

Their terms were strict, I couldn't borrow any employer payments and only half of my own contributions. That amounted to a maximum loan to me of $6000 dollars from myself. There were several really good things about that loan -- there was no credit check made; there was no lender approval process; no one could turn me down since it was my own money; at around 6% the interest rate was much lower than any normal lender would give; the loan was not reported to the credit bureaus; the payments were automatically deducted from my paycheck; and the best thing, in my opinion, all of the interest was paid to myself -- it all went back into my 401k account along with the principal portion of the payments.

My only regret was that the 401k didn't have enough money to pay off the credit card company completely. I had had some hope of being able to float enough of my rent check, utility bills and minimum checking account balance to cover the last $3000 before the first payment was taken from my paycheck; but at the last minute I chickened out. It would really have been a stretch and probably wouldn't have worked anyway. So for the duration of the 18 month loan from my 401k all I could do was repay that debt and continue with the minimum payments on the dishonest credit card.

At this point I should add that whenever I was paying off a huge chunk of that credit card bill, I employed my "stealth" strategy. That company had demonstrated that they could and WOULD claim not to have received a payment whenever they felt it was to their advantage. So making out one big payment for $6000 was absolutely the wrong thing to do. They'd "lose" it for sure.

Instead what I did was find an unused payment stub and made about a dozen photocopies of it. Then I proceeded to make out checks for $394 and $512 and $457 etc. Each check was for a unique sum and all were for much less than $1000. That way the processors would not notice any one payment. None were for a huge amount. And I could afford to lose one check out of the whole group. Then I mailed the payments one at a time. I'd phone their 800 number and see that each check had been received and processed before I mailed the next check. It took me something like two months to get all of those payments made stealthily.