10 Tips to help you recover money:

PREPARE: Reviewing the paperwork prior to calling is important. If you know the history of the account, the promises kept/broken and payment history you sound better on the phone. Have all records in front of you, ready for reference.

ATTITUDE: Adopt a professional attitude. You have a contract or you delivered goods now money is owed to you and you have a right to expect payment promptly. Never ever let it become personal. Don’t yell or raise your voice; and NEVER swear. Don’t threaten physical harm; legal action is your recourse.

CONTACT: Make sure you’re talking to the right person. Don’t let the individual brush you off with “You’ll have to talk to the bookkeeper.” Identify the person who will pay the bill. If you cant get through after several calls, tell the secretary that you know your calls are being screened. Indicate the purpose of your call and if necessary give deadlines.

CONTROL: Always control the conversation. Keep it focused on the debt and on the repayment schedule. Do not let the debtor sidetrack you with personal history, excuses, etc. Remember, the objective of your call is to collect money, or get a commitment to pay not to become friends with the debtor or win arguments.

FLEXIBLE: Be ready to adjust to the situation. Think about the kind of customer you’re dealing with and adapt to meet the circumstances. Be prepared to accept a reasonable payment schedule, and a willingness to deal with a customers circumstances.

NOTES: Try to Keep detailed, accurate notes of every single contact with the debtor. Always probe for additional information on the debtor. Notes of these contacts will help you in later phone calls, and may be invaluable if litigation is needed. Great notes will also help in credit decisions in the future or in cases where skip tracing may be needed.

PRODUCTIVE: Keep contact brief and to the point. This is a business call, not a social one. View your efforts on a ratio of time expended to results achieved. Long conversations probably mean the customer is stalling you, or trapping you in the buddy syndrome.

PRECISE: Never leave a call open ended, such as “Well talk next week,” or “Ill send what I can.” Every single call should result in a commitment to some kind of payment, You need a specific amount, by a specific date, even the check number the customer is using to pay the promise.

TIME: The longer an account is outstanding, the less likely it is that it will be paid. If payment is not arranged or a payment plan is not established within 90 days, place the claim with a collection agency or start legal proceedings.

PLACEMENT: Try to choose an agency that does not have to pay to get your information. Just type in “Collection Agency” to any search engine and pick a firm that ranks organically.

Mallory McGuinness is employed by a collections agency that works with a debt collection lawyer. She also does pieces on business, finance, consumer spending and collections agencies.

Would you be mortified if a man in a tuxedo and a top hat followed you into a restaurant and silently joined your lunch date? How about a trio of men with more to love dressed like superheroes asking your neighbors for donations to assist you in your financial situation?

In Madrid, make sure your bills are paid or you might be visited by one of these colorful characters. The recession has slammed Spain. Official figures show that the unemployment rate has sky rocketed, reaching 19.3 percent. That’s one of the highest rates in Europe. Around four million people are not working. That’s the same number of jobless people as France and Italy put together. One business is flourishing however, that business is debt collection.

Spanish law is pretty lax when it comes to debt payment. They allow 95 days to settle bills unlike the 30 in other parts of Europe. This, coupled with the fact that Spanish courts give the matter low priority put collection agencies in high demand.

One debt collection company, El Cobrador del Frac – which can be translated as “The Debt Collector in Top Hat and Tails” – has more than 250 collectors, and an equal number of investigators and secretaries.Their main goal is to work out some deal and retrieve money, not to run after people without the money to pay.

For them, the new business stems from constructive trade which is suffering badly from a huge slowdown. Homeowners owe money to contractors, contractors owe money to construction companies, construction companies owe equipment makers, and so on and so forth.

Last year, the company had a wedding company contact them about a couple who didn’t pay the $83,000 bill for their huge over the top wedding. The company obtained a wedding guest list and began calling up guests one by one on the phone and asking them if they had the chicken or the lobster, and then asked them where to send the bill. Eventually the shamed couple paid up.

These ideas are quirky, (I guess that is one way to describe it) but they will not be this effective in times to come. In this time of economic crisis, too many people have debts and they honestly can’t pay. And to these people, it doesn’t matter how much you humiliate them.

Mallory McGuinness is employed by a debt collection company. She also does stories about business, finance, consumer spending and debt collection.

This week, Visa made an announcement stating that starting this summer it’s not going to require signatures for transactions of twenty five dollars or less. It will most likely bear the results of faster and smoother transactions but it could also chip away at the payments industry’s effort to move toward contactless technology.

Taking effect in July the new policy makes about ninety eight percent of more than eight hundred United States merchant categories in Visa’s system will be able to accept their cards that are issued by U.S. banks with no signature. This opens the waiver to a ton of additional merchants and extends Visa’s current no signature rule which covers only twenty six merchant categories.

Visa says that the new policy means faster and more convenient and faster payments for people carrying credit cards. According to a survey, sixty nine percent of respondents say either convenience or speed is the main reason why they use a card. Also, the new policy may help issuers get into the cash dependent markets. In actuality, seventy five percent of cash transactions in the United States are less than twenty five dollars!

However, this move towards no signatures may trump the credit industry’s move towards contactless payments, which would speed up card transactions and prep the world for mobile payments.

Contactless technology involves radio waves that are transmitted by a special equipped chip card and eliminate the need for a card swipe while simultaneously speeding up the time it takes to make a sale.

Visa doesn’t see a conflict of interests, saying that it’s no signature rule and it’s contactless technology go hand in hand. It states that these are complementary, with no signatures paving the way for contactless sales. For them, going signature free is just an initial step towards the newer technology.

Mallory Megan works for a debt collection agency. Also she does stories on business, finance, credit industry and http://www.linkedin.com/companies/rapid-recovery-solution-inc.?trk=ppro_cprof&lnk=vw_cprofile

There is no doubt that text messaging has become a major medium for exchanging information. Easy, painless, no speaking on the phone. No wonder that according to the latest statistics that have been taken there were almost 750 billion text messages sent in the U.S. in 2009, almost double the number from one year before. Actually, technology and research firm executive Jacob D. Almeida recently predicted that money transfers will be the top mobile application by as early as 2012.

Debt collectors have stayed out of this field for now; The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act was a landmark legislation that went into effect in the late 1970s and has strictly outlined how debt collectors can call and when. Seeing as this act is even older than a stereotypical “Saved by the Bell Cell phone” from the 90s, it might be due time to adjust the law. But analysts are saying that any change in this area would have to come from consumers seeking change, not collectors.

Under the FDCPA, communications with consumers require a notice that the text is in fact from a debt collector, which leads to issues with the 160 character maximum length of money transferring messages. Another hurdle is determining who will pay the message. There is no current way for a collection agency to know if a consumer has a plan that includes unlimited text messages; the kicker being that if a contact is paid for by the debtor, it is illegal.

Another potential hurdle for debt collection agencies is determining the ownership of the device itself. The debtor might be utilizing a company owned wireless device for example. Said company might be monitoring the usage of the device, which would lead to third party disclosure issues if there were communications based in text that discuss a debt.

Sadly, Congress has to vote on health care, the budget, cap and trade and many other issues first before it can get down and tackle this text message issue. So time will tell.

Mallory is employed by a debt collection agency. She also writes articles on consumer spending, the credit industry and debt collection.