The Expert Podcast

So what is phantom debt, how can it hurt you, and how do you get rid of it? Great article from CNBC came out this week about phantom debt starting to raise its ugly head. Phantom debt is a term that's assigned to loans or obligations or debts that happened before that have long since been considered dormant or sometimes considered gone, and now they're popping back up.

Remember back in 2008 there was a financial crisis? That crisis lasted 2 or 3 years from about 2007 to 2010. Many people had foreclosures, had repossessions, had judgments, had all kinds of claims against them, liens against them during that time. Well, that was 15 years ago at this point, right? A lot of people thought, "Well, after 15 years, I don't have to worry about it." Well, now that the economy's gotten better, there's been some inflation, a lot of these debts were sold to private collection agencies for pennies on the dollar—almost nothing—and they just sat on them. They didn't have to do anything, and now they're popping up and saying, "Now this debt is good." They're starting to pursue people, starting to contact people, starting to maybe try to claim assets, and it's surprising a lot of people that thought, "Well, since I didn't hear from anybody for so long, I thought this debt was gone." Sometimes debts do go away after a certain statutory period of time; sometimes people think 5 years or 10 years, but lien holders can do things to extend it. They can put another filing on or do some activity that extends that deadline.

You will be back in your video in just a few seconds. In the meantime, remember that ActualHuman.com offers you live one-on-one private video consultations with an expert in this exact subject. We want to listen to your story, we want to hear your questions, we want to give you expert advisement of your options and tell you what we know about your particular situation. Now back to your video.

And you may not know if they did it or not because it doesn't have to necessarily notify you. So what do you do if you do have any debt, even if you haven't heard from debt collectors? You may want to look at filing for a lien release, and there are different ways you can do that. You can send out notices to the lien holders, you can file with the court for a court-ordered lien release. Again, we're not attorneys giving you legal advice, but if you are worried about some prior debt that you're not sure whether or not it's still valid, don't go by your credit report. Your credit report may have it; it may have fallen off, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it's no longer valid. You may want to look at ways to formally take it off of any obligation. Whether it's a car loan, maybe you clear it off the title; if it's a real estate mortgage or lien, you want to take it off your property. First, you have to find out if it's there, and you can do title searches on real estate or vehicles. You can check out our website for those, and then you might want to file paperwork to remove that from the asset using a lien release request process, and our website will describe that in a little more detail as well.

Phantom debts are starting to pop up. If you are a victim of a phantom debt now claiming against you, you may want to see if it is something that you want to take proactive measures to make sure it doesn't affect your future on buying a car, a house, or reappearing on your credit and lowering your credit score or costing you money. Thank you for watching. Remember you can access live one-on-one personal consultations with a licensed private investigator, a licensed commercial insurance broker, a licensed certified real estate title examiner, also a certified civil court mediator. So if you have a need to talk to an expert in any of these fields or even a licensed building general contractor, you can click the link below ActualHuman.com and arrange a live one-on-one undivided attention with a licensed expert where you can ask any questions, get information about your situation, and we'd be glad to help.