How do I find a legitimate, premium credit repair service?
"Just a word of warning: Most of the companies that promise to repair your credit are scams or close to them.  You could just as easily do yourself what they are going to charge you for. Essentially they write a letter to the credit agencies disputing most or all of the bad stuff on your credit report. When you do that, the credit agency sends an inquiry to the company that reported the negative information requiring them to justify it. If that company doesn't respond within x days, they remove the item from your credit report. These companies depend on the fact that some companies aren't going to hit that deadline or even respond. Perhaps they are just too busy to hassle with providing backup documentation for a $20 late payment. They are banking on getting a few of these cheap ""outs"" to your benefit and charging you for what amounts to sending out a bunch of form letters. If you don't mind writing a bunch of letters, then you can save a lot of money and get the exact same results. These companies want to pretend they have some insider knowledge or fancy lawyers that know special credit-magic, but they generally don't. The only option I'd consider legitimate and not a waste of your time is a referral from the non-profit National Federation for Credit Counseling. They aren't going to ""fix your credit"", but will give you advice on budgeting and repairing your credit on your own." If the bad credit items are accurate, disputing the accuracy of the items seems at best, unethical.   If the bad credit items are inaccurate, the resolution process provided by each of the 3 credit bureaus, while time consuming, seems the way to go.
How can I find out what these 'additional' costs will be when looking to buy a car? If you know what model you're interested in buying you can try out Edmund's True Cost To Own calculator. This will estimate the depreciation, taxes and fees, financing costs, fuel costs, insurance premiums, maintenance, repairs, and any tax credits for owning a certain model for various periods of time. You can improve the accuracy be substituting your own calculations, like if you already have an insurance quote. Consumer Reports has a useful chart to demonstrate how much each of those additional costs will add up, percentage-wise. They also list the most and least expensive cars to own. First thing you need to do is  to find out whether your landlord  will accept credit card payments.  If yes, then I recommend you to try the easiest method first. Pay rent though a rent payment service.  So, you need to log in with rental service and then chose the credit card using which you would like to pay rent and schedule your rent payments. I can safely assume that a credit union or a bank, probably a bank based on the size of the short term loan would allow use of the annuity as collateral for the loan. Since the future payouts from the annuity will more than cover the total costs coming due for your education I'm sure the bank will have no problem loaning the money and you can see if doing a direct payment monthly to them will reduce the rate. You can try a credit union since they will most likely give you a more favorable rate. If you can get a credit union to do it, you will most likely be paying a lot less, but typically they want interest paid monthly and not at the end of the 6 months term.  There is also a service called TMS or Tuition Management Services which you can find at Tuition Management Services They typically also expect monthly payments but might do an alternative for you, they charge I believe a $60USD fee to use their service. Also just flat out bank shop and demand the lowest rate, its guaranteed money so you should be paying LIBOR plus 1 at most, see if you can direct your next payout to them with the balance coming to you. As a landlord for 14 years with 10 properties, I can give a few pointers: be able and skilled enough to perform the majority of maintenance because this is your biggest expense otherwise.  it will shock you how much maintenance rental units require. don't invest in real estate where the locality/state favors the tenant (e.g., New York City) in disputes.  A great state is Florida where you can have someone evicted very quickly. require a minimum credit score of 620 for all tenants over 21.  This seems to be the magic number that keeps most of the nightmare tenants out makes sure they have a job nearby that pays at least three times their annual rent every renewal, adjust your tenant's rent to be approximately 5% less than going rates in your area.  Use Zillow as a guide.  Keeping just below market rates keeps tenants from moving to cheaper options. do not rent to anyone under 30 and single.  Trust me trust me trust me.  you can't legally do this officially, but do it while offering another acceptable reason for rejection; there's always something you could say that's legitimate (bad credit, or chose another tenant, etc.) charge a 5% late fee starting 10 days after the rent is due.  20 days late, file for eviction to let the tenant know you mean business. Don't sink yourself too much in debt, put enough money down so that you start profitable.  I made the mistake of burying myself and I haven't barely been able to breathe for the entire 14 years.  It's just now finally coming into profitability. Don't get adjustable rate or balloon loans under any circumstances.  Fixed 30 only.  You can pay it down in 20 years and get the same benefits as if you got a fixed 20, but you will want the option of paying less some months so get the 30 and treat it like a 20. don't even try to find your own tenants.  Use a realtor and take the 10% cost hit.  They actually save you money because they can show your place to a lot more prospective tenants and it will be rented much sooner.  Empty place = empty wallet.  Also, block out the part of the realtor's agreement-to-lease where it states they keep getting the 10% every year thereafter.  Most realtors will go along with this just to get the first year, but if they don't, find another realtor. buy all in the same community if you can, then you can use the same vendor list, the same lease agreement, the same realtor, the same documentation, spreadsheets, etc.  Much much easier to have everything a clone.  They say don't put all your eggs in one basket, but the reality is, running a bunch of properties is a lot of work, and the more similar they are, the more you can duplicate your work for free.  That's worth a lot more day-to-day than the remote chance your entire community goes up in flames "My guess would be that they sell your debt to a collection agency and don't really bother with pressing charges for 500 dollars.  A collection agency can do multiple things to hold you accountable for your debt. I hate to bring it to you but it only makes sense that you should try to resolve this debt given that ""not being careful enough"" is not facebook's responsibility. I also assume they won't let you run any further ads on the same credit card. Edit: What you could possibly do is call facebook and be honest with them, tell them it was an accident and that you can't pay the current amount. Maybe they'll waive the debt or give you a settlement offer." Suing is a legitimate option as well as screening your calls but here's another idea which has personally worked and relates to the collections I did for awhile.  Talk with the collector.  Outstanding debt gets sold many times and each time a new collector gets their hands on an account they do their due diligence which means calling every single number multiple times.  Collectors a looking for consumers who actively evade collections calls for years. My recommendation is to use logic and explain the situation.  Give your first name and describe when you received the phone number and then ask a simple question.  When in the last 3 1/2 years have you or any collector had a successful hit from this number.  They'll respond never in 3 1/2 years.  The collector notes the account for themselves and future collectors.  Debt collectors are about about making money, not wasting time and they do review all notes pertaining to an account.  Will it work?  Maybe not but hopefully it will stop the calls with a short conversation.  Good luck. "Customer support, getting information, dealing with stolen identities, etc. I had to file a credit discrepancy report with both. Transunion: ""we'll look into it"". Equifax: ""okay, you need to do this... this.. this... this... this... maybe we now can help you"".   It's almost faster to let Transunion deal with it, and let Equifax realize they goofed" "Parts of what you want are possible, but taken as a whole, you're out of luck. First of all, there is no master database of every cardholder in the country.  The only way to check if information is correct is to ask the issuing bank.  The AVS system is a way to automate doing so, but it's possible to call the bank directly and verbally verify the address.   That means you're subject to the whims of what the issuing bank chooses to support.  Banks that are part of the Visa and MasterCard networks generally only verify the numeric parts (address, apartment number, zipcode).  AmEx can also verify the cardholder name.  But if the bank doesn't have support for validating something, you can't validate it. Separately, there is a ""verify-only"" transaction which some processors support, which will do exactly what you want:  Return AVS values without ever charging the card.  However, processors require you to have the ""approved merchant account"" you don't want to have to have.  Without being a merchant, you shouldn't have access to other people's credit cards anyway.  Would you really want anyone in the country to be able to verify anyone else's address whenever they want? In short, whatever purpose you have for wanting this probably falls into one of three categories:"