Firstmark Concerning Email/ Some Confusion : Do I Respond?/Next Steps?
Posted by Aggravating_Storm493@reddit | studentloandefaulters | View on Reddit | 4 comments
The background is : I got my student loans discharged via bankruptcy with an adversarial procedure. The private loans were discharged ~ last year. My co-signer has the loan removed from his credit report after my own was discharged, they didn’t do anything for this to happen, it just fell off one day with the balance being $0. They were paying the amount but then Firstmark/Discover stopped. And the loans are still removed both from my and their credit reports.
However, my loan was Discover and obviously bought by Firstmark.
After over a year of my co-signer and I not hearing from Discover or Firstmark, I received letters saying I owed them money last month. My lawyer is handling it and told me not to worry. But I worry about my co-signer.
Today, my cosigner got a sketchy seeming email that had the lie of : Firstmark was trying to contact several times now. This is untrue because they’ve never sent any communication other than a letter proof to say auto debit on the account was removed. So they obviously know the physical address. And they obviously know the email address. And on their website, there are 0 messages in the inbox and 0 statements in the statement tab.
On top of that, the email wasn’t even addressed to my dad - it was weirdly blank as if it was a form email? But an actual human owned email address from Firstmark sent the email. The email today says that the account is severely delinquent and that it is in danger of going into default by the end of the month.
But wouldn’t it already be in default if as of today, it’s 269 days delinquent? We’ve been checking our credit reports daily as we have some credit report services due to my bankruptcy. And the loans haven’t reappeared so I don’t know if that’s normal or not? On top of that, if the account is so delinquent, shouldn’t their credit have plunged by now? It’s still quite high.
I don’t know if I should respond (the co-signer is my dad and I live with him so I have access to his correspondence with his permission) and I don’t know what the next steps should be. My lawyer says she’s only representing my case and also said there really isn’t much to do yet with my dad’s if there even if anything to do yet. And we talked to a debt settlement lawyer today who said there’s nothing to be done yet until it goes default, or if it even goes default.
Anyway thank you so much, I’m obviously quite a bit panicked but reading through this sub has shown me there’s a lot of scare tactics from these services.
jonsonmac@reddit
I’m not a lawyer, but I’m fairly certain that even though you got a discharge, your co-signer is still liable unless he also gets a discharge. This is why I didn’t even go through the process.
Aggravating_Storm493@reddit (OP)
You’re right, the co-signer can still liable.
That’s why I found it weird that they didn’t contact the cosigner for almost a year, and only did so today with a sort of sketch leaning email and nothing via mail or official inbox like I’d gotten in the past. And that the loan isn’t on their credit reports even as of today / their credit score hasn’t tanked yet. Like, there are no delinquents on the credit reports at this moment, and you’d think they’d be updated if it’s now 270 days of no payment.
And that is why I guess I’m trying to hope for the improbable here : that FirstMark is trying to scare into getting some money from the co-signer without having the loan being officially put back in repayment. Which we know is unlikely. I guess that’s delusion for us.
Ultimately, bankruptcy was right for me because this co-signer cosigned one loan that was “only” 1/4 of my total amount that I ended up taking out for school… so the bankruptcy at the very least wiped out the rest of my loan balances for good as those other loans didn’t have a cosigner.
hlaiie@reddit
How were you able to get it discharged in bankruptcy?
Aggravating_Storm493@reddit (OP)
I admit it was a lengthy process. After an arduous, soul crushing, and damn near life ending series of years, I contacted my local legal aid, and was connected with a bankruptcy lawyer who specializes in student loans from their own experience.
Thanks to a law change earlier in the 2020s, it’s less horribly hard to discharge federal and private student loans but still a challenge.
The process started about 2.5 years ago. We filed for regular chapter 7. That is actually pretty easy and was approved by the judge fairly quickly. It required a lot of data collection for my lawyer to prove that amount taken in was less than amount needed to pay the debt each month.
The real work began with the adversarial procedure which is filed after bankruptcy is filed, which essentially is like a lawsuit saying that these student loans are proving to be an immense hardship and that there is no way the debtor will be able to pay them back even if they used every single dollar coming in to pay back said debt. In my case, I’ve had documented health challenges spanning over a decade that have only gotten worse and my financial outlook was such that the federal and private loans would never be paid back.
I had to prove this to the judge, not to the loan servicers. The loan servicers are allowed to make a case that the debtor can indeed pay back the loans. In my case, the private loan servicer literally never showed up even with my lawyer constantly contacting them and never getting a response… and after the judge rescheduled the meeting several times, gave me a default judgement in favor of full discharge. This took about a year after my initial bankruptcy was approved because the private loan servicer never showed up and the judge wanted to make sure they were all giving them enough chances to prove their case insert eye roll
The federal loans required additional paperwork related directly to federal student loans but it was info akin to what the initial bankruptcy needed, data wise plus a few personal statements as to why the loan was an excessive burden. My federal loans were only discharged a few months ago, because unlike my private loan servicer who just never showed up, the US attorney kept asking for more time for their case and asked it over and over and over until time ran out, and the judge gave me a default judgement in favor of full discharge.
If I’d known been on this sub before today, I wish I would’ve applied my co-signer for cosigner release before going through bankruptcy as that’s why I posted today to figure out what to do with Firstmark now.
I hope what I wrote helps. Feel free to ask anything else, I hope I can be of any use.