Circumstances beyond your control may have forced you into financial difficulty. Believing the circumstances to be temporary, you may have used credit cards to pay your bills, becoming saddled with intractable debt in the process. At Jimmy E. McElroy & Associates, we understand that many people in Tennessee prefer to explore options other than bankruptcy, choosing to file only as a last resort. To that end, you may have negotiated a repayment plan with your credit card company. Once you and the card issuer reached an agreement, you might have reasonably assumed that that would be the end of the harassing phone calls.
Unfortunately, this may not be the case at all. Even after making repayment arrangements with a credit card company, some people still receive annoying phone calls from card issuers requesting payment. According to FindLaw, federal law places limits on phone calls from creditors in the interest of preventing harassment. However, the government’s definition of what constitutes harassment may not match yours.
For example, the law requires creditors to call only during reasonable hours, which it defines as between the hours of 8:00 a.m. and 9:00 p.m. on any given day. However, there is nothing to prevent a credit card company from calling at 8:00 a.m. precisely, while you may be busy eating breakfast, getting ready for work or still in bed asleep. They may also call during the late afternoon or early evening, while you are trying to cook dinner or take a much-needed nap. Furthermore, the law does not constrain creditors to calling only on weekdays, meaning that they are within their rights to disrupt your weekend as long as they do so within the 13-hour timeframe that the government deems “reasonable.”
Entering into a repayment plan with your credit card company may allow you to pay off your debt over time, but it is insufficient to stop the harassing phone calls. However, when you file for bankruptcy, creditors can no longer legally conduct debt collection activities against you, meaning that the phone calls will finally stop and you can regain your peace of mind and go back to living free from harassment. More information about what bankruptcy can do to stop creditor harassment is available on our website.