WAMU is killing our credit – help!
Question: My friend is getting screwed by WAMU. She declared chapter 13 two years ago, but not on WAMU loan. Nevertheless, her WAMU loan was shifted to their bankruptcy dept. As a consequence, WAMU is not releasing her payment history to the credit agencies and she does not have a credit score as a result. This is making it very hard to get a loan to refinance and emerge from Chapter 13. WAMU is being extremely unhelpful, saying that it’s their policy not to release credit history on customers who are in chapter 13, even though the wamu loan wasn’t a part of the bankruptcy and every payment made to WAMU was always on time. Do others banks do this? Is there anything we can do?
Answer: Let me see if I got this right. Your friend borrowed money, did NOT pay it back, got the courts to make it go away (for the most part, except this WAMU thing), and
SHE is the one getting screwed???
IN my opinion ALL bankrupties should mean that the person has to pay off a litle at a time until ALL the debt is paid off to ALL the people THEY have screwed! You buy it, you PAY for it. WHy should “I” be stuck paying for something that you bought from me when YO are the one that ran out of money. As a charity?
I hope she NEVER gets a credit score. WHy allow her to borrow MORe when she never paid back the FIRST money she borrowed.
Just part of the liberal bent that we are all victims, and we all “deserve” to be able to do wahtever we want, no matter what we did to screw others in the past. This is simply untrue. Many bankruptcies are filed to get rid of a slimeball creditor who has put his victim into some crooked investment and sold off the notes to a bona fide buyer for value. (Who is rarely as bona fide as the court documents proclaim.) Others are to save a house from foreclosure: in two cases I am personally familiar with the breadwinner died and it took months for the kids’ social security benefits to kick in and pay the arrears of mortgage. Chapter 13 was the perfect solution: making the KIDS bankrupt. You want to blame THEM for their misery?
In many cases most of the creditors co-operate to help the debtor, and 99% of the creditors are helping the debtor to force an intransigent (and usually stupid, bureaucratic) refusenik creditor into line.
Most bankruptcies are due to death, divorce, loss of job, illness. Many Chapter 13s and Chapter 11s are 100% plans, where every creditor gets paid in full. But the slimebag creditor who perhaps wanted to foreclose on the house, and buy it through a strawperson for exactly the amount owed on the mortgage, and thus steal the debtor’s equity — is prevented from doing that. This is why Congress enacted the law for Chapter 13s (formerly known as a “wage earner plan”).
But that only answers your ignorant, prejudiced posting. Lots of innocent victims of WorldCom, Enron and the others will be filing bankruptcy soon. Lets hope the new bankruptcy reform bill doesn’t stop them in their tracks. Some may be forced into bankruptcy by their former employers failure to pay their expense account, which leaves the fired employee to pay the credit card for travel bills, etc.
To answer the original query, the likely problem is that that WAMU loan is classed as having been through bankruptcy (you can’t NOT include any particular debt in bankruptcy — that’s illegal — and obviously the bankruptcy came to WAMU’s attention. What you may mean is that you paid WAMU outside the Plan, and that’s possible. But unless you signed a re-affirmation agreement with the approval of your lawyer and the court, WAMU is still covered by the stay (or after the Plan is complete, discharge) and many such “in-rem” creditors (in rem because their lien survives bankruptcy unscathed but they have no further claim against the debtor personally) refuse to send any kind of statement to the now-discharged debtor.
Often your lawyer can resolve the issue, sometimes not without a lot of hassle (and, consequently, hourly billing to you). Much depends on state law, and your entitlement to tax information. You might be able to get the IRS to help you. Or you might bring a small claims court action against WAMU on some pretext, and get discovery of the document you need.
Not knowing what WAMU is, I did a google search; perhaps it is http://www.washingtonmutual.com ?
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