Wife sent to collections for ticket she paid ten years ago
"The first thing you should do is write a letter to the collection company telling them that you dispute all charges and demand, per section 809 of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, that they immediately validate and confirm any and all debts they allege you owe. You should further request that that they only communicate with you by mail. Section 809 requires them to examine the legal documents showing you allegedly owe a debt and they are required to send this to you. This all creates a useful paper trail. When you send the letter, be sure to send it as certified mail with a return receipt. From your description, it doesn't sound like this will do anything, but it's important you do it within 30 days of them contacting you. This is because the law allows them to assume the debt is valid if you don't do it within 30 days of their initial contact. I recommend you speak with an attorney. Most states have a statute of limitation on debt of about 4 or 5 years. I don't know if that applies to courts though. Whatever you do, be very careful of the language you use when speaking with them. Always refer to it as ""the alleged debt,"" or ""the debt you allege I owe."" You don't want them misconstruing your words later on. As far as proving you paid it, I would look through every scrap of paper I'd ever touched looking for it. If that proves fruitless, try going to the courthouse and looking through their records. If they're saying you didn't pay, that's a long shot, but still worth a try. You could also try bank records from that time, like if you have a Visa statement showing $276.17 paid to the Nevada Court or something like that. If all else fails, the law allows you to send the collector a letter saying that you refuse to pay the debt. The collection company then legally must stop contacting you unless it's to tell you they are suing you or to tell you they won't contact you again. I strongly advise against this though. Your best bet is going to be speaking with a qualified attorney. Edit: You should also pull your credit reports to make sure this isn't being reported there. Federal law gives you the right to have a free copy of each of your credit reports once every year. If it is being reported, send a certified letter with return receipt to each bureau which is reporting it telling them you dispute the information. They then are required to confirm the information. If they can't confirm it, they must remove it. If they do confirm it, you are legally entitled to put a statement disputing the information next to it on your credit report. I am not an attorney. This is not legal advise. You should consult an attorney who is licensed to practice law in your particular jurisdiction." I had this happen to me with parking ticket when I was still in school.  The tickets were issued by the school police and later dismissed (because I had purchased a year-long parking pass).  3 years later I got a letter alleging that I had unpaid parking ticket.  So they lost the record of dismissal.  But they did not lose the record of having issued the ticket.   I am fairly certain this happens because legal entities either lose electronic records and restore data from backups without realizing that some corrupted data remains lost or because they transition to a new system and certain real-world events don't get transferred properly to the new system.  Of course, the people with whom you end up interacting at that point have no idea of any potential technical problems (because they may occur only in some technical one-off cases).  In my case, I was able to show that I had received a judgement of dismissal.  I actually kept the paperwork. The question is what do you do if you lost the records and the state had lost all electronic records of your payments.  Let's assume the collections agency has a record (produced by the state) that you owed the ticket amount, but the state claims that no record exists of you having paid the tickets.  What do you do, then? Carefully compile the list of all possible banks which you could have possibly used.  Then request duplicate statements from all the banks which you have on that list.  Assuming you were a regular consumer and not running a business, this should not amount to more than 100 pages or so.  If you do manage to find the transactions in those bank records, you are in luck.  States, unlike the federal government, are not immune from law suits.  So you can consult a lawyer.   By fraudulently claiming that you defaulted on payments, the state caused you material harm (by lowering your credit rating and increasing your cost of borrowing).  Once you have all the paperwork in hand, you still will have difficult time finding anyone in the state to listen to you.  And even if you do, you will not be compensated for the time and expenses you expanded to obtain these records. If you indeed paid the tickets, then you are being asked to prove your innocence and you are assumed guilty until you do.  Again, a good lawyer should be able to do something with that to get you a proper compensation for this.
If you keep the account in your name only and your girlfriend is depositing money into it, then she is in effect making gifts of money to you. If the total amount of such gifts exceeds $14K in 2014, she will need to file a gift tax return (IRS Form 709, due April 15 of the following year, but not included with her Federal tax return; it has to be sent to a specific IRS office as detailed in the Instructions for Form 709). She would need to pay gift tax (as computed on Form 709) unless she opts to have the excess over $14K count towards her Federal lifetime combined gift and estate tax exclusion  of $5M+ and so no gift tax is due.  Most estates in the US are far smaller than $5 million and pay no Federal estate tax at all and for most people, the reduction of the lifetime combined... is of no consequence.  Another point (for your girlfriend to think about): if you two should break up and go your separate ways at a later time, you are under no obligation to return  her money to her, and if you do choose to do so, you will need to file a gift tax return at that time. If you will be returning her contributions together with  all the earnings attributable to her contributions, then keep  in mind that you will have paid income taxes on those earnings all along since the account is in your name only.  Finally, keep in mind that the I in IRA stands for Individual and your girlfriend is not entitled to put her contributions into your IRA account. Summary: don't do this (or open a joint account as tenants in common) no matter how much you love each other. She should open accounts in her name only and make contributions to those accounts. I pointed this out to my wife (Russian), and she said not to forget that most of those imports are from old soviet satellites, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Latvia, ect...    Infact, your own article, just a little further down states:  &gt;The major food exporters to Russia last year were, in order of importance: Belarus ($2.7bn), Brazil ($2.4bn), Ukraine ($1.9bn), Germany ($1.8bn) and Turkey ($1.68bn), Reuters news agency reports.  None of those countries with the exception of Germany are sanctioning Russia, and are thus not part of the embargo.  Not sure how impacted Ukraine's production capacities have been with the conflict?    My wife is convinced that the none EU partners Russia already imports form will keep up just fine.  The other Russians I know, agree, and think this was a good move by the government.  She thinks the whole point of this embargo is to impact Germany so they get the EU to stop blatantly doing whatever the US wants, since this will impact them probably the most of the EU members. Also, is seems the wife that's doing the taxes is very reluctant on giving me access to the statements. As an owner, I do have the legal right to those statements do I not? What power would a majority owner of a bar (40%) hold over the other two minority owners (each with 30%)? According to her, she's broken even on her investment, whereas I've collected not even half of my initial investment. The fact that you feel this is fishy reconfirms my belief that she not being truthful to some degree. Welcome to Money.SE. It appears there's public transportation to get you to work? And the area by your house is walkable? i.e. you and your wife can get groceries and other needs by walking. If it will take 5 years to pay the loans even without a car, how long if you get one? Will you even be able to afford the payments?  There's not enough detail here except to say that all purchases aside from true needs have a cost/reward to consider. Whatever the car's total cost is, will it add that much pleasure to your life? People in cities with great transportation save quite a bit on the expenses a car brings.  Personal anecdote - Mom lives in a city. She never drives out of the city. Ever. Between insurance, maintenance, and gas, even with low miles, she spends $3000/yr. Once per week, she drives 1500 ft (.3mi) each way to the grocery store. Once every month or 2 to a mall 6 miles away. She can walk and groceries delivered for free. In the end, she spends $250/mo for the feeling of freedom. I get that. When I am 70+, as she is, I will gladly pay car service the $20 to drive me around.  You are young, and need to sit with your partner (your wife is your partner in the business of running the family finances, or so I hope) and decide if the benefit is worth the cost. How does she take the kids to a doctor? How do you go out to dinner? Consumerist posted a list of how long to keep bills. This discussion indicates that the accounts are not reported to credit agencies, but the post is also over a year old, and who knows how reliable the information is (it's fairly well-traveled, though).  It's based on one person calling up Trans Union and E-Trade and asking people directly. By law, your wife can get her full Equifax credit report (sans-FICO score) instantly (once every 12 months) via https://www.annualcreditreport.com She can even get her FICO score with a 7-day free trial of Equifax Complete Premier. I have all the info I remember reading into to this when I was studying law and long hours always led me to Reddit. So pretty much what happened was he had a Reddit post that him and his wife were getting a divorce and he was left broke and wanted to see the world, and people banded together to help, as stated up above. He made it to Michigan first, around the year 1998 when the undertaker threw Mankind off the hell and the cell plummeting 16 feet into an announcers table