An update on this situation.
TL;DR of original situation: I married a guy who ended up having substance abuse issues (and a bunch of other stuff). He cheated on me, I divorced him, one of the divorce agreements was that he would pay off his medical debt from going to rehab. He didn't pay it off, it went to collections, and ruined my credit. After three years of pestering him and finally taking him to court again, he paid the debt (around $2400) in full.
However, my credit was still shitty. I had originally had credit around 750, and this situation dropped it to 650. I wrote a Goodwill Letter to the CEO of the debt collection agency as kind of a last-ditch effort type of thing, explaining the exact situation and asking for his understanding, as this was greatly affecting my life (I'm looking into buying a home in the next year).
I never heard back, but I checked my FICO score through AmEx, and this month it jumped from 649 to 749. I pulled my credit reports from AnnualCreditReport.com, and lo-and-behold, all of the negative marks are just gone. I guess I'm assuming the Goodwill Letter worked, since none of the marks were set to drop off for 5 more years.
At any rate, I highly recommend writing a letter if you ever find yourself in a situation where you're being affected by something like this. It can't hurt, and the worst thing that can happen is you'll be out a half hour of your time (or however long it took you to write it).
Edit: Here's my letter. It's a total sob-story and obviously very specific to my situation, but I know that people are sometimes curious about what a successful letter looks like.
Submitted June 12, 2017 at 10:53AM by OminousRectangle http://ift.tt/2sUmtCp
