Home-buying: our first snag

It’s my fault. Sort of. We’re being blackmailed – BLACKMAILED! – I tell you. Sprint & some “White overnite” company. Our credit union, our first choice for the loan, is saying that the PMI underwriters are probably going to deny our loan app because of these two collections accounts on my credit report. The total outstanding balance? $700.

Really, what the hell guys. Let’s put this in perspective: in the 16 months we’ve been banking with them, we’ve managed to rack up $20,000 into that account. In less than 20 months, we’ve saved $20,000 with them. Also in that time, we’ve: bought a brand-new, 2009 fully-loaded Tacoma; Bought two – not one, but two – brand-new laptops; adopted an additional two dogs; spend various amounts of money on things like Blu-Ray players, cameras, and apparently, sex toys.

Now paying the amounts “owed” is not a problem, financially. It’s a matter of principle.

“White overnite” is one of those “sign up and receive crap for free” scams that I forgot to cancel until after they charged my card. I cancelled after that though. They kept charging me. So, I had to go so far as to cancel my CARD, and then have a new one reissued with a new account number, because they kept charging my account regardless. Nice, huh? So, they sent me to collections, because they want $115 for the trouble of trying to charge my card.

The other is Sprint. As in, Sprint PCS. In early 2006 we cancelled our service with them. Wait let me back up. In late 2005 we changed from at&t wireless to Sprint. They had recently bought up Nextel, and I guess to celebrate they came out with some fabulous family plans. So we switched. Big mistake of course, right? No service. None at home. None at work. Well, intermittent. I’d say, 5-10% service. Every call was a dropped call. Usually right in the middle with no warning, followed by an ear-piercing beep in your… ear. They switched out phones, I went in again when that didn’t work to do something, the fed me a line about “bandwidth blah blah blah” and “let the phones adjust to the signal.” I’m sure you can guess what happened, no? Signal still not there. I went back later, a few days before the 30-day return period. They said to bring in the phones to the tech and he’d figure out what was up and fix it, because we should have a good signal. Cool.

Brought them in – now two days after the 30-day return period – to be told that the tech would only look at the phone for an additional $70. So. They couldn’t make their phones or rather their service work, and then wanted me to pay $70 to “look” at my phones. A little late I know, but I caught on to their game, and walked out and walked in to an at&t wireless shop to port the numbers back over.

And now? We’re being freaking blackmailed. How the hell can two illegitimate companies with illegitimate claims have such power over this transaction? I know that “technically” there’s two collections accounts on two of my credit reports. But crap… Seriously. These people need to stop thinking with pieces of paper and start thinking with their brains. Holy f*ck this is ridiculous.