the girly who shall end all girls

when last we left our heroine, i had found out that there was some kind of small medical debt on my credit report. i froze about this for a while, but finally pulled my reports and contacted the creditor.

it hasn't been on my report for that long, just since August went to collections in August and hit my report in January. and it's definitely not me - ambulance transport in NY state in late 2021, when i was here in Seattle mostly isolating from omicron. here's the fun part: this other person shares my not-at-all-unique wallet name AND birth date, may even be a partial SSN match.

the three credit bureaus are interesting - one took my dispute and automatically cleared me. one said we'll look into it and get back to you. the third basically said we won't believe you, only the collection agency, go talk to them ಠ_ಠ

the collection agency is clearly used to people lying to them; all i could get on the phone was "I've made a note on your account" and "this call is recorded" when I asked for proof that they would do anything in response to the contact ಠ_ಠ

i may have hit paydirt by contacting the actual ambulance company. it took a while to get my point across, but it finally clicked that the middle names don't match. they said they'll call me back AND they gave me a direct phone number and a contact name.

after that i found a contact email for the collections agency, so i'm trying the written route there, asking what would constitute proof that i'm not (a very minor) deadbeat in upstate NY. i think i've found their actual target via social media - she lives in the correct town, pictures are plausibly my age, and she has a disability that would probably account for a lot of medical bills. i don't want to risk being wrong and hurting someone else so i'm not going to hand that over, but it took me maybe 15 minutes ಠ_ಠ

I ordered a leather pen case and then repented by fixing up the 2022 budget tracker.

It's financial experiment time: buying a home would be more than we pay in rent. If we set aside the difference between rent and a mortgage payment into savings every month, are we comfortable or scraping by? Anyway, we used to use this tracker and got out of the habit, I recommend it, very easy once it's set up. Budget tracker spreadsheet fed by Google form just put a shortcut to the form on your devices and fill when you spend money.