Thowaway account because my gf and other friends know my normal Reddit username.
I've been with my girlfriend for about 3 years now, for streamlining the story, we will call her Alice. Prior to this she was with the same guy for 5 years or so, we will call him Bob. Bob was an emotionally abusive person and Alice doesn't speak to him now.
During the time they were still dating (around 2015 if memory serves), Alice and Bob bought a timeshare property in Cancun together. From what she has told me they both signed the contract, but I'm not sure of any other details there. According to Alice the cost was around $6000.
Fast forward to when we began dating, Alice started getting calls from the timeshare group. From what I gathered there are maintenance fees that must be paid every month and they were trying to collect them. I told her in no uncertain terms that I thought owning this timeshare was a bad decision for several reasons, and urged her to get rid of it, although I will admit I didn't know what that process entails, I trusted her to sort it out. It took her some time but eventually the calls stopped and I trusted that she cleaned her hands of it. I didn't ask any questions.
We were checking Alice's credit report a few days ago and found that she had $10,800 reported as in collections in October 2017 from a collections agency in Oceanside CA, (not sure if posting the name of the agency is against the rules, but I can if it helps) with the timeshare group reported as the original creditor. The original amount reported to collect was around $8000. We haven't received any calls from the timeshare company in a long time, and have never gotten any calls or mail from the collections agency, but we've moved around a lot over the past year and it's possible they don't have an updated address yet. She also changed her number last year because Bob was still sending her harassing texts years after they stopped seeing each other.
I've been trying to figure out how to give Alice guidance on this, but I don't have a lot of information. She doesn't have the contract her and Bob originally signed, and she hasn't been in contact with Bob for the reasons stated above. I'd love to get this resolved without needing to involve Bob at all but I'm not sure what the options are here. Part of me want's to get ahead of the problem and speak with a lawyer about it, and another part of me thinks that since they clearly haven't tried to contact Alice yet, that in another 5.5 years the debt will go away, right? I don't want to initiate contact and then get harassing phone calls from these people, but they're clearly charging some kind of interest or fees on the amount she owes and I have no way to find out how much. A quick Google search of both the timeshare group and the collection agency leads to a ton of terrible reviews about both companies scamming customers, which isn't surprising.
I have no personal experience dealing with something like this, especially with this much money, so I would really appreciate any insight that you guys have for Alice and myself.
Submitted February 17, 2019 at 04:25AM by timesharefuckedmeup http://bit.ly/2Ii516l
