Are you experiencing excessive phone calls from collection agencies? Know your rights. Watch our Personal Finance 120 video about collection agencies, your rights as a consumer, and how to manage your collection accounts.

Transcription: Hi, I'm Carly Cherry and welcome to personal finance 120, information for managing your financial life in less than two minutes. Today, we're going to be discussing how to deal with debt collectors. The Fair Debt Collections Practices Act is the federal law that governs the debt collections process, and it contains a number of important consumer protections. Debt collectors are prohibited from using abusive, unfair, or deceptive practices in order to collect from you. Some of the activities prohibited by the Act include using profane or obscene language, falsely threatening to take legal action, disclosing your debt to other parties without your consent, and threatening violence or imprisonment. The best thing to do is to try to keep your bill active with the original creditor. This means, calling the bank or merchant you owe to discuss making partial payments if you're struggling to make your monthly minimum. Explain your situation and ask them if they would be willing to re-age your account. When a creditor accepts payment lower than the balance for two or three months in a row a re-age can occur and your account can be brought current. If they aren't willing to do this for you, they may be willing to negotiate a long-term payment plan. These typically last between six months and a year, and are designed to bring your account current, reestablishing a good payment pattern for you. What happens though, when your account is sold to a collector? The first thing to do is to exercise one of your rights under the Fair Debt collections Practices Act, which allows you to challenge the validity of the debt. When you do this, request that written documentation be provided to you. This isn't an attempt to defraud the collector, or anything of the sort. they must have appropriate documents to pursue your debt. while you're waiting for that documentation, use the time to revise your budget and create some space, so you can propose a reasonable payment arrangement. The next time you talk to the collector explain your situation honestly, and negotiate from there. Remember two things: first if they have proper documentation the collector can see you at any time, and second never promised more than your revised budget will allow you to pay. That’s all we have for today on debt collection issues. Don’t forget to check us out on social media for more videos, articles, and tips to help you with your financial needs. Until next time, I'm Carly Cherry for Cambridge Credit Counseling.