Credit Card Debt Collection Nightmare

by Paul W.
(Champaign, IL, USA)

I am a professional working for a bank that has a significant amount of outstanding debt that has not been paid. This year we have been looking at large dollar amounts of unpaid debt that we may have to potentially write off as a loss. As a junior worker at the bank, I was assigned to the collections divisions and it has honestly been terrible.

Growing credit card debt collection is one of the biggest issues with my bank as it is for many others in this current economic crisis. Even as I write this now, there are going to be hundreds of people overdrawing on their credit cards.

Whether it is through poor lifestyle choices or through desperate times, let's face it, credit card debt is going to be going up a lot more than we want it to. As a country, we have a terrible average savings rate and the amount of total credit card debt is well over 4 trillion dollars.

These are nasty figures and while my own bank is nowhere near that big, we've still been having issues collecting outstanding credit card debt. One of the things that has proven to be most difficult has been timing. A lot of debt accumulates in seasonal periods: summer, Christmas, spring break and other times. I work in a town that is home to a large state school and we have a lot of student accounts as well as residential deposit accounts. It is difficult to manage, and keep up with.

One of the first things that we began working on was dividing the debtors in terms of their paying habits and income and creating different collection strategies to collect. We used phone and mail, we sent out emails to college students who were behind on their payments, etc.

Our credit card debt figures have gone down and this has been a good thing but it has taken a lot of work and will certainly continue to do so as the recession affects us all.