When it all goes bad

Sometimes people get the car finance, look after the vehicle, make a few payments and then decide it’s not a priority anymore. They have loads of other bills to pay and seem to fall back into the trap of "maybe I'll pay it later" syndrome.

The problem here is that if you have obtained the vehicle from a specialist subprime company with car finance, they don't hang around waiting for you to pay when you want.

The car finance account usually falls pass due into a list after a day or at most three days overdue. At this point, the collection machine starts to move into action.
It’s not usual for you to receive a polite reminder in the post, nope that was a thing of the past when your credit rating was good. Now, you will receive a telephone call from the car finance company and put into an auto dialler list so they can get hold of you as soon as possible. Depending on the collection technique of the company, they will try all the known numbers, work, home, mobile etc. They also will not leave just a polite message; usually the car finance will call and if you don’t respond, will diarise the call for later in the day. Don’t forget, this isn’t something they do manually and might forget, this is on an automated system (dialler) so you can be assured that the car finance company will continue to call all the known numbers until they can get hold of you.
So, the best solution is to take the call as soon as possible. You need to respond in a none combative manner and arrange to make the payment as soon as possible.

Your real objective when taking the call is to ensure that the collector "feels" that you are not a problem and it was a mere oversight on your behalf and the car finance problem is now solved. This way you don’t get comments on your file about a bad attitude or offensive behaviour. This is important because if they need to speak to you again, the person calling you reads the notes of the previous call before they talk to you and therefore you don't start with the collector thinking that you are going to be difficult with them.