Discharged and surprised

[fiveyear]

After receiving our official discharge, I am shocked by the amount of loan offers that have streamed into our mailbox and email. From local car dealers to credit rebuilding loans, even TFS Billpay is in on the action with their own version of let us help you rebuild your credit with a loan at 28% interest. It is crazy. It is like they are setting you up for failure again if you didn't learn your lesson the first time. I wouldn't have expected quite so many offers popping up but I guess that is the way it goes. Luckily 4.5 yr of BK has made us a bit wiser.

[justbroke]

Almost like vultures descending upon what they believe to be helpless prey.

[shipo]

Good for you; lots of bottom feeders come out of the woodwork shortly after a discharge, and by and large, you either say "No", or you set yourself up with predatory lenders. Wait six to eight weeks, and then apply for a couple of high quality secured credit cards, Navy Federal and Discover both offer secured cards (as do a number of other credit unions and some banks) which can grow after graduating to unsecured.

Last year after learning my lesson about low end secured cards (I got a CapOne card with a $1,000 limit, which was totally insufficient for my monthly spend), I shot the moon and opened a secured card with a $5,000 limit with my local bank (this card graduated to unsecured after only six months of use). With that card in hand I was able to cover all of my monthly spend, collect cash-back rewards, and start rebuilding my credit in a way which set me up for future success. Within the first year I'd landed a total of three well respected unsecured cards with a total of $14,000 in credit.

[flashoflight]

They even come out well before discharge. The vultures came out for us a few months after the chapter 13 was initially filed and the initial rebuild apps. We did not get any car offers, but we had lots of credit card offers going into the shredder because they came with annual fees of $70-$300+. The wife got better offers including non-predatory offers because a tradeline survived for quite a while. With the annual fees, the credit limit was often just double the annual fee like $300-$600.

I just heard the credit card companies are worried because Americans are paying off their debt during the pandemic and may loosen underwriting standards to offset the loss in interest income. So the barrage of credit offers in the mail may get worse.

[shipo]

I just heard the credit card companies are worried because Americans are paying off their debt during the pandemic and may loosen underwriting standards to offset the loss in interest income. So the barrage of credit offers in the mail may get worse.

It may already be starting, I've gotten no less than four reasonably decent no fee credit card offers from Mercury over the last couple of weeks and a barrage of loan offers from LendingTree and BestEgg (yesterday alone I got pre-approval offers for $86,500 combined between those two). As thing stand now, it is the rare day when we get more "normal mail/junk mail" than I get credit card and loan offers.

[justbroke]

I receive offers nearly every day. Most days, which is actually the norm, I receive 2 to 3 offers in the mail. I was hoping that they ran out of stamps and paper. Most of them are consolidation offers, but receive preapproved credit card offers as well. To the shredder they go.

[Carmella]

We have just under two years left in BK13 and we are getting ads to purchase a car in active BK, it says drive away the same day. I don't think so since I know the trustee has to be involved!

[Barbisi]

We have gotten junk CC offers for a long time with an average of 25+ % interest and just ignored them as we threw away the envelopes and shredded the personal info. A couple of times the interest was surprisingly low and when I read the small print I could see we wouldn't have qualified anyway : an active BK immediately disqualified the applicant. I think we were sent those by mistake.
We used to get used car junk ads two or three times a weeks, but lately none. So far , we haven't needed to replace either of our ailing cars; instead we have had to spend all the stimuluses and any tax refunds, etc to keep them running. But that's better than trying to deal with a low life loan shark of a used car dealer!
We also get those debt consolidation loans and loads of mortgage refi offers -they always list our original loan amount with out ever adjusting downward for the equity we have supposedly built up over nearly five years of monthly payments and they offer varying amounts of available cash equity of 3-30K . I don't understand these offers , but our wish and plan is to sell , not refinance!

[shipo]

Barbisi, yeah, those debt consolidation offers I keep getting are crack me up, I mean seriously, I was discharged from my Chapter 13 only 15 months ago (Today!), how much debt do they think I've managed to run up in that time? Even still, just two days ago I got two pre-approvals for debt consolidation in the mail, one from BestEgg for $36,000 and another from LendingTree for $50,000. Yeesh!

[brokenurse]

They even come out well before discharge. The vultures came out for us a few months after the chapter 13 was initially filed and the initial rebuild apps. We did not get any car offers, but we had lots of credit card offers going into the shredder because they came with annual fees of $70-$300+. The wife got better offers including non-predatory offers because a tradeline survived for quite a while. With the annual fees, the credit limit was often just double the annual fee like $300-$600.

I just heard the credit card companies are worried because Americans are paying off their debt during the pandemic and may loosen underwriting standards to offset the loss in interest income. So the barrage of credit offers in the mail may get worse.

This has been my experience. We're a year out from discharge and I get something daily to apply for. It goes right in the garbage.