DPB

In this case, OC is not the hospital. OC is the doctors association for the doctor side of the ER visits. The hospital had initially sent me to collections, but when I found out I called and made it very clear that they were wrong and would be sued. So they removed the collections immediately. The doctors association has been the one that’s refused to to the right thing. The CA has a direct assignment from the OC (doctors association). That part I was able to confirm. It’s one of the very few parts of the letters that they (the OC) actually provided a response to. The hospital would be included in any legal action because it was their billing department that messed up originally. And because of the errors by the hospital I am now being balance billed by an out-of-network provider that was chosen by the in-network hospital for three ER visits. Neither the CA or OC care that this isn’t legal in Florida. And none of the government entities that are supposed to be providing oversight and regulation care either. The more I think about it, the more angry I get. I was able to get the financing I needed recently, but only because I chose new creditors based on where they pull credit. But I’m annoyed that I had to do it that way. Other things I’ve just paid for in cash rather than deal with having to pay higher interest rates. I’m glad hat I’m in a position to be able to make a decision like that. But after thinking about it overnight, I completely agree that a lawsuit is in order whether they remove these collections from my EX report or not. Many people wouldn’t be able to decide to just pay cash for some large purchases, so I definitely agree that action needs to be taken to prevent this scenario from happening to someone else. Adding the hospital to any legal action may not yield any financial penalty for them, but it will cost them in attorney fees. Plus any negative publicity for a large charity hospital network - which constantly points out their charitable contributions locally - could help them decide to audit their billing department and practices. Hopefully that could help prevent this issue for others. And if it’s enough bad publicity, my hope is that it would make them decide to pressure the doctors association to stop their illegal billing practices and maybe even no longer use this CA. Or even better, drop this doctors association and find one that is honest. I’m going out of town in a couple days, so im focused on getting ready for that. But I’ll be picking this up again with the attorney once I get back.

Valid point. So I’ll wait a little longer see if the collections get deleted from EX also. Then I’ll have the attorney go after them. He’ll just have to adjust the letters to remove the parts about removing the accounts from my credit files (assuming that they get deleted from EX). I’ll ask him if he thinks it’s a good idea to add something forbidding the OC and CA from reporting these ever again. I doubt that the CA would care if I’m awarded a judgement. But maybe if the hospital and OC are included they will drop that CA entirely. I’m sure they’d care a lot about losing that account.

Update: I decided to hold off on contacting an attorney until after the first of the year. I had to refinance two auto loans and I was also going to be getting new financing on a third vehicle. After some research I found out that the banks I was planning to use all pull EQ, and since that report wasn’t showing the collections, my score was well above what I needed to secure the lowest offered interest rate. I thought that there was a possibility that if I filed suit, the CA would notice that the collections weren’t on EQ and then try and add them to that report. In my mind it wasn’t worth the risk. A couple weeks ago I spoke with an attorney that’s a family friend. He said I’d have a good case, but I’d need to include everyone involved in the lawsuit - OC, CA, EX, TU, and the hospital (since their billing department didn’t give my insurance info to the OC which is what started this whole mess). The initial demand letters have all been drawn up as of last week. The plan was to send them out this week. Well, about 10 minutes ago I got alerts from Credit Karma and MyFICO that all three collections were removed from my TU report. My score jumped 40 points! I think I’m going to call the attorney and have him wait on sending all the demand letters. Maybe the accounts will soon be removed from EX too and I won’t have to spend any more time on this BS. I’m sure I could probably collect something for damages at this point, but if everything just goes away and this saga ends and I don’t have to deal with it anymore, fine by me.

Thanks for the input everyone. I’ll definitely follow up with MyFICO and see if I can get more info. I checked all my accounts immediately after seeing the alert, and everything is good there. No unknown charges and the balances are exactly what they should be. I also checked today, and the security freezes on all three CRAs are still in effect. I’m not sure why it didn’t occur to me to do that immediately when I got the alerts. I’ve been working on repairing my credit over the past few years, which has been quite a pain. So this probably just had me overthinking things a bit.

It shows a drop of 2 points. I’m just concerned that it says I owe $86k on some account that I’ve never seen before. If there was an actual chance, wouldn’t I also get an alert from CreditKarma? Could this just be a glitch from MyFICO? I really hope it’s just a glitch.

Nope. Not even close. I have three auto loans ($100k, $50k, $35k), no mortgage, and a half dozen credit cards. All cards are under $30k limits (except for two Amex cards), and none have a balance over $3k currently.

I just received two alerts from MyFICO. One says that my balance on a personal finance account has decreased by $651 and the balance went from 86,721.00 to 86,070.00. The second alert says that a personal finance account has been removed from my TU credit report. MyFICO doesn’t dive any account details when clicking on alerts. And there is no list of accounts like on CreditKarma. CreditKarma shows none of this activity. And when I check my full report on both apps there is no personal finance account listed. So how do I figure out what this is? Is this a glitch with MyFICO? Now it has me freaked out about identity theft. Any my help or insight would be very much appreciated.

Citi: 866-606-2787 did not work 800-695-5171 rings directly to a live person (US based) for New Accounts UW/Recon.

Thanks for the info. I wasn’t aware of that. So maybe I’ll reapply in a year if I can’t get one of the declined cards to reconsider their decision. And I’m working on the medical collections. I spoke with an attorney already. He advised me to not proceed until after I got all the car loans completed just in case the CA decided to try and add the collections back to the EQ report. So now that all that is complete he’s going to draft a demand letter to everyone involved.

Ugh. Ok. And thanks for the advice. I’ll stop by the dealership in a couple days when I’m near there. I’m fine wasting 15 minutes of my time if there’s a chance. Otherwise, I guess I’m stuck with a ton of inquiries for the next two years.

No. Maybe I have to start recording conversations when talking about credit. Instructions were given to them over the phone and in person, so nothing in writing. Are they able to tell the credit bureaus that it was their mistake and remove the inquiries?

Are they really considered legitimate if they are for banks that I specifically told the dealership to NOT apply to?

So I’ve thought about it for a few days, and I’m really annoyed that the Audi dealer had my credit pulled so many times. I had given them a list of three credit unions I wanted the loan through. I also told them to NOT run my application through specific banks. I had done a bunch of research first, so I knew which credit unions were offering the best rates. So they completely ignored my instructions. I’ve verified that it isn’t an all or nothing thing either. The finance person chooses which lenders to shop the loan to. So instead of just three hard pulls, there were 11 from this one refinance. I’ve received the rejection letters from the credit cards that were declined, and every one of them state “too many inquiries” as the sole reason for rejection. Should I dispute the 8 inquiries that I didn’t approve? Also, would a “backdoor” call to the rejected card banks yield positive results if I explain that the dealership did?

Good news!!! I was approved for Tier 1 rates for all three vehicles. I wanted to do all three loans on the same day, but the Mercedes dealer didn’t have everything ready to go until 3pm on Wednesday. By the time I got out of the dealership it was after 5pm. Since Thursday was Thanksgiving I had to wait until Friday to do the two refinances. I ended up up not using the credit union that I have accounts with. I spoke to the branch manager and she told me that they are getting very strict with auto loans because their now former underwriter had approved a ton of bad loans recently. They wanted two years of tax returns plus balance sheets from both of my businesses and some other paperwork to verify my income and assets. Apparently this is SOP there now on all loans, even though the monthly soft pull from EQ showed my score being 790. So I decided to go elsewhere to save me many hours of searching for and copying documents. The new Mercedes is financed through MB Financial at 4%. For the Audi that was coming off lease, I used the dealer’s finance department since I had to go there to sign paperwork to end the lease and officially purchase the car. Audi Financial’s best used car rate is over 5%, so they shopped the loan to about a dozen lenders (that’s the only negative because it ended up adding about a dozen inquiries to my credit file). I got the best rate from a large credit union with quite a few branches within 10 minutes of my house. So now that car is financed at 3.25%. It’s 4% minus credits for getting gap insurance through them and for auto pay. And the gap is refundable, so in a couple months when the LTV drops below 100% I’ll get a refund but keep the rate discount. For the truck, I went into a branch of the credit union that I did the Audi loan with. I asked if they would approve me for a second loan. They took a look at the loan for the Audi and said it shouldn’t be a problem, but that they’d have to do a new application and hard pull on my credit. They use EQ, which is my highest score. So I went ahead with the application, and they approved it. At this point they were getting ready to close for the day, so I’ll be going back tomorrow (Monday) to sign the paperwork. This one is also the same 3.25% rate with discounts. Considering the original loan from Ford was over 7% due to me taking the rebates when I bought the car, it’s a massive savings. While led I had my credit files unfrozen I decided to apply for a couple credit cards (I only have two and feel I need some more trade lines). I got approved for an AMEX Gold. I applied for a couple more cards the next day, but by then all the inquiries had hit so I was declined. Oh well. It would have been nice, but the AMEX was all I really needed. The rest would have just been a bonus. So it seems to have all worked out pretty well. Marv, since you asked, the credit union offers 125% LTV. I’m right at 125% on the truck and I’ll be under 100% on the Audi once I make my second payment. Mercedes was willing to let me roll in about $12k in negative equity from the car I was trading in. So that would have been about 115% LTV. But I decided to pay that off. I used the $3k deposit from ordering the car as a down payment and financed the rest.

It’s a bit of a long story, but the cliffs notes version is that the dealer screwed up. If you custom order a car and the dealer tells the regional office that it’s a sold car, it goes through the port before cars that are just going to sit on the dealer’s lot as inventory. The sales guy didn’t mark it as sold in the computer. And the manufacturer seems to be holding unsold cars with this engine at the port right now. Supposedly because of CAFE compliance. I’m sure the sales manager or GM called the regional office to fix their mistake.