Hello.

Welcome to debthaggle.com.   

This is a website dedicated to helping people successfully deal and negotiate with collection agencies. 

Reports say that in 2013 the average American household is anywhere from $7,500 - $15,000 in credit card debt.

This website and the advice within is not intended to deny personal responsibility and the role that you played getting in yourself into debt.  It is quite the opposite.  This mission here is to help you accept responsibility and repay your debts in a sensible and systematic while spending as little as possible to do so.  It is possible to repay your debts fully without paying the total amount that you owe.  It's not cheating, it's not illegal, it's a business transaction that if done correctly can save you a lot of money.

I’d like to take a few moments to tell you my story... 

I ended up having to deal with debt collectors after a seven-year affair with the consumer lending industry that left me nearly $22,000 in debt on a lavish lifestyle, but I didn’t. 

The bulk of the credit card debt was used to cover college costs that were not covered by my financial aid, such as a portion of tuition, books, summer and winter courses, and any number of ridiculous university fees. I was working a part time job and didn’t always have money after paying the big bills, to cover the little things.  So there was four years worth of gassing up the car, grabbing a quick lunch between classes, and other incidentals that I had to put on my credit card.  I didn’t particularly enjoy it but they kept my minimum payment manageable and I thought I was doing a good job keeping up with it.  I never made a late payment and never went over my credit limit. 

Never making a late payment I owe to my own diligence.  Never going over my credit limit I owe entirely to the credit card companies.  It seemed like every other month I was getting a credit limit increase.  It seemed that whenever I would approach my credit limit they would grant me some extra breathing room by increasing my limit by five hundred or even a thousand dollars.  How convenient.

After graduating college I began working full time immediately.  The job I landed fresh out of college was entry level in my field and did not pay very much.  I was financially underwater – student loans, a vehicle payment, cell phone, insurance, living expenses, and of course the credit cards.  Driven by pride and a sense of obligation I struggled to make my minimum payments month after month for nearly two years. During which time I had to take out a personal loan. The offer had come in the mail and it seemed too good to be true.  It was.  I rationalized the same way many other people do; if this giant well-known company thought it was a sound idea to lend nearly $9,000 to a recent college graduate already up to his neck in debt, who was I to say they were wrong?  They were the experts, right?  I was young and naive, I needed the money and if they were going to give it to me, right or wrong, I was going to take it.  Besides, they wouldn’t lend the money to someone who couldn’t pay it back right? 

I was teetering on the edge and I knew it.  Work slowed down a little, I was late on a payment or two, and then the minimum payments began to go up – the fees started to mount and I was completely incapable of making the payments.

Through researching my dilemma on-line I figured that I only had three options available to me; debt settlement, debt consolidation, or bankruptcy.  I’ll go over each of these in the next section, “Your Options”.

Ultimately I decided on debt settlement and enlisted the help of a company I found online.  It didn’t work out the way I had hoped, to say the least.  I ended up doing the bulk of the work, I still got all the harassing phone calls, and as it turned out – I did a better job negotiating with my debt collectors than they did, and I was paying them to do it!

At the end of the day I handled the debt collectors and the settlement process on my own.  It took me a while because I had to learn everything on my own.  But when I was through I was able to settle that $22,000 for just around $11,000.