In the past, we blogged about a recent trend among local governments who are so desperate for income that they’d begun taxing basic services on everything from dry-cleaning to hiring a magician for your kid’s birthday party. Now, these cash-strapped provinces are looking for more aggressive tactics to try and save themselves from this recession, which can make personal credit repair just a little harder.
Better clear out that drawer of unpaid parking tickets
Yes, it’s true. The days of blowing off parking tickets in a lot of states are coming to an end. Of course, if you’re a responsible adult, those days were never around in the first place. But for the rest of us you, who throw out those ticket stubs almost as soon they’re handed to you and never pay any more attention to them, those days are over – assuming you care about the state of your credit history, that is.
Whereas before you may have only troubled yourself with minor worries like higher car insurance rates or the possibility of losing your driver’s license, local governments are cracking down and sending any and all unpaid or idle tickets (both parking and speeding) straight to collection agencies. So now you not only have to worry about paying off that speeding ticket you got 3 years ago and dealing with the repercussions on your insurance rates, you add it showing up on your credit report and driving down your credit score to the list of worries as well.
And unlike a ticket, which can be paid and forgotten in an afternoon, a collection on your report is like a bad case of herpes – it’ll follow you everywhere.
And while you’re at it, the library wants a word with you about those overdue books
Not content with adding to your worries with throwing your unpaid tickets to the wolves, many state governments are looking at library fees for extra income as well. Your local library (that’s that big building where they store a bunch of books, for our younger readers) is tired of you not returning those overdue books and DVDs, and since revoking your library card doesn’t seem to do the trick (who’da thunk?), they’ve begun following the parking tickets’ example and begun forwarding your overdue fees to, you guessed it, a collection agency.
Unlike parking tickets, overdue fees from a library should really be a non-issue for most people, I would think. Just imagine the embarrassment of opening a letter from a collection agency telling you they intend to collect on that long overdue copy of Twilight you checked out in secret, and that should incite you to pay off any fees.
Seriously, we’ve been in this business for over 10 years, and have seen every kind of collection known to man – from major medical bills to unpaid fees from Pizza Hut and Blockbuster – but collections for overdue library books? That’s a little much, we think, but clearly local governments are trying every tactic they can to keep themselves out of the red for as long as they can. And if you want to make sure you don’t wind up on the wrong end of these tickets and fees, and want to keep yourself on the right path to debt relief, stay on top of your finances before they’re pulled out from under you
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