The phone company assigned her a new home telephone number that once belonged to someone on multiple debt collectors’ lists. She and her family received calls from collection agencies all day, every day.

You don’t have to put up with it.

“The one company did call, and I was home to answer the phone,” our reader says. “I explained to the person that the phone number was recycled as of this summer and told her to call Cox (her cable/phone company) if she needed to verify. She was sorry about the mass callings and said she would take care of it.”

Her conversation helped end one company’s calls. Our reader still gets calls from other firms, only she’s usually not home to explain them away.

But she can still clear up her phone line.

“The first step is to put this complaint in writing to the debt collector,” says David P. Leibowitz, an attorney at Lake Law in Waukegan, Ill. Send it certified mail, too, so the collector can’t claim it was lost.

Leibowitz also suggests checking your credit reports to make sure someone else’s debt wasn’t accidentally put onto your report.  (It happens — trust me. I just had my record cleared.) If you think your credit report is wrong, file a dispute with each credit agency on which the debt appears to have it struck from your record.

If you feel you’re being harassed — especially if the debt collectors start threatening you, which is illegal — you can sue under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act.

You can also consult a consumer advocate attorney at the National Association of Consumer Advocates if you want advice or an attorney to write a letter for you to get creditors off your back for a debt that isn’t yours.

It sells their email addresses to unscrupulous scams trying to make a buck off of their financial woes.

We found this out through Heather, an attorney from Philadelphia.

It seems that Harold, a man Heather doesn’t know but who has a similar last name, applied for a payday loan.

But instead of putting his email address on the form, he put Heather’s. (Honest mistake? Deliberate deception? She doesn’t know.)

Not only did she receive a copy of his loan documents, but she’s being inundated with up to 20 emails per day offering to help the cash-strapped Harold.

A surprising number claim they want to loan him even more money.

“Are you a little stressed with bills piling up? Get up to 1500 as soon as tomorrow,” those emails say, often in tell-tale fractured English of foreign crooks. “Once you complete the form and you can get the money you need overnight.”

Yeah, right.

They just want Harold to provide the critical personal financial information, such as bank account and Social Security numbers, to steal his identity and make his life a little more miserable.

If he was desperate to go to a payday loan store, they figure he might be desperate enough to fall for their scheme.

Heather’s also getting emails about only slightly less work at home programs, satellite cable deals with headlines of “Don’t pay…your next Cable bill without reading this!” and offers for credit cards “built especially for people with bad credit!”

“I never got this kind of spam pre-Harold!” Heather says.

We bet.

These people are truly shameless.

According to a new report from the National Consumer Law Center supposedly respectable banks are getting in on the action, too.

Of course they don’t call them payday loans, because of the horrible connotation that carries.

Instead they’re called account advances and peddled to customers whose paychecks are directly deposited into their checking accounts.

A little short on cash before your next check is due?

The bank will advance whatever you need, right into your account, and then repay itself when the next deposit of $100 or more is received.

The law center says banks pushing this service, including U.S. Bank, Wells Fargo and Fifth Third, are charging $2 for every $20 borrowed.

That works out to an annualized percentage rate of 240% for customers who are paid semi-monthly and take the advance a full 15 days before pay day.

The cost jumps to 521% APR for customers who get the money just seven days before they’re paid.

Whatever the bank may call them, the law center says: “These advances are payday loans, plain and simple — triple digit loans repaid on the next payday.”

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised to see this.

Why should we expect banks to pass on the chance to charge their customers 521% interest just because it’s…it’s…what the word I’m looking for? Oh yeah, wrong.

And how did the banks even get the idea to get into the payday loan business?

The law center found that industry consultants are suggesting it’s a great way to replace the income banks once got from overdraft fees.

(The Federal Reserve is forcing banks to get permission before enrolling customers in overdraft protection programs before charging those fees. Some banks are pressuring customers to “opt-in.” Others aren’t. Here’s a look at how many of the larger banks are responding to the new rules.)

So if a salesperson calls to pitch you one of these loans under the guise of a clever name such as “Early Access” or “iAdvance,” politely decline.

Then drop by your local branch and tell the manager how disappointing it is to see the bank stoop to this and suggest they paint the building a bright yellow.

Check out this PayScale College Salary Report on how much the typical grad can expect to make.

If, for example, you take out $100,000 in loans at 6.8% interest and plan to pay that off over 10 years, your student loan payment will be $1,150 a month, or $13,800 a year.

You can probably afford that if you’re on your way to becoming an aerospace engineer, one of the most lucrative jobs in the study, with an average starting salary of $60,000 a year and mid-career income of $100,000.

But that’s not the case if you’re going to be a social worker or elementary school teacher, where the average starting pay is $33,000 a year and the mid-career salary is $42,000.

This student loan calculator shows how much you must earn to keep up with post-college payments.

Trust me. You don’t want to graduate with student loans you’ll spend the rest of your life trying to repay.

Too many kids I know got hooked into that “no price is too high for your college dream” bull****.

A recent column in the New York Times detailed the problems of Cortney Munna, who graduated from NYU in 2005 and has no idea how she’ll repay her $100,000 in student loans.

In “an eerie echo of the mortgage crisis, tens of thousands of people like Ms. Munna are facing a reckoning,” Ron Lieber wrote. “They and their families made borrowing decisions based more on emotion than reason.”

If you’re already burdened with college debt, take a look at our post on how Lily’s List can help.

Borrowers start the process by signing up at Lilyslist.com and providing a copy of their loan statement.

Then parents, relatives or even anonymous donors can use credit or debit cards to make contributions that are sent directly to the lender.

Donations are in addition to, not a substitute for, the borrower’s regular monthly payment.

The site is the creation of four moms concerned with student debt. President Jennifer Taylor got the idea while having a frank discussion about student loans with her daughter, Lily, now a freshman at the University of Iowa.

“She was horrified” at how much her education was going to cost, Taylor says.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a free service. Lily’s List, Inc. is a for-profit company. Grads pay $15 a year to sign up, and every contribution carries a $2.75 fee.

But we think Lilyslist.com has a future because student loans have become such a burden for so many former students and their families.

The average student graduates college with over $23,000 in debt, and a lot of them are having a tough times finding the jobs they need to pay that money back and begin their adult lives.

We also like that the site verifies the loans are legit and ensures that contributions make it to the lender.

We’ve seen Web-based pleas for help paying down student loans, usually through a blog that’s collecting money through PayPal, for example.

But there’s no real way to check that the sob story’s true, or that the money isn’t be used to fund a nice trip to Tahiti.

If Lilyslist.com takes off, Taylor says companies will be allowed to put ads on the site in exchange for donations to its participants.

It also hopes to attract anonymous donors looking to help grads from their alma maters.

So if you sign up, make sure to put in your school and any fraternity or sorority affiliation, and fill out your “about me” section.

You never know what can catch a donor’s eye.

But will its new savings accounts and CDs catch on?

First, the yields aren’t that great — and already being cut.

When Sallie Mae introduced its savings accounts in early March, it was paying 1.35% APY. Now it’s paying 1.25% APY.

Although that’s still above an average return, it certainly won’t make it into our rankings of the best nationally available savings accounts, which are paying as much as 2.00% APY.

Second, everyone I know hates Sallie Mae.

As the largest broker of private student loans it’s burdened a generation of college students with more high-cost debt than they can ever hope to repay.

Sallie Mae started out as an arm of the federal government. But when it went private in 1997, it ratcheted up the marketing about how “the college dream” must be attained at any cost.

As college costs soared, a growing number of financially naïve students had to borrow from private lenders to make up the gap between tuition and what they could borrow through Pell Grants from the federal government.

Sallie Mae made sure it got a huge share of that business by more-or-less bribing employees in student aid offices at colleges and universities across the country with all sorts of perks, such as luxurious vacations.

Although it promised to end that scandalous behavior in a 2007 settlement with the New York attorney general, the damage was done.

Hundreds of thousands of students had taken out loans that cost more than they should have and gobbled up such a huge chunk of their income that it’s impossible to save for anything — or even move out of their parents’ basement.

That makes Sallie Mae’s new business more than a little ironic to all of those students and their families struggling to meet their monthly payments.

If the returns are ever good enough to crack Bankaholic’s rankings of the best savings accounts or CDs, they’ll be included.

But I’ll understand if you give us crap for it.

Sounds like a good thing, right?

But it’s the misleading title of a 53-page bill the Florida Bankers Association has drafted and wants the state legislature to enact.

The new law would make it faster and cheaper for lenders to repossess property by giving them the right to foreclose without having to go to court and obtain the permission of a judge.

That isn’t a radical idea. Thirty-seven other states already have laws that allow for non-judicial foreclosures.

But calling it “consumer protection” is a positively Orwellian attempt to manipulate public policy through propaganda and misinformation.

This is a law that could put families out of their homes in as little as three months and leave them liable for any losses the lender incurs. It is truly a bill of the banks, by the banks and for the banks.

Joe Manausa, a Tallahassee real estate broker, has already asked the very relevant question, “Does The Florida Bankers Association Think You’re Stupid?” and started soliciting more honest names.

Among the suggestions already submitted are:

• The Florida Bankers Association Bill
• The “Florida Bankers Want To Remove Judges From Making Sure The Laws Are Enforced Fairly” Bill
• The “Banks Should Be Able To Foreclose If They Feel Like It” Bill
• The “Save the Banks” Bill
• The “Bend Over!!! Your Assets are Mine!!!” Bill

We can only hope that Florida legislators think long and hard before supporting this manipulative effort — no matter how much the banks have donated to their campaigns.

Click here to read more about the bankers’ bill on TampaBay.com.

You can borrow up to $25,000, and repay the loan in 36 equal monthly payments, with a fixed interest rate as low as 7.89% APR.

If you apply before Feb. 1, you’ll even receive a $100 credit to your account within 30 days of receiving the loan.

Just click here to qualify for this exclusive offer to Bankaholic readers. (Sorry, time’s expired on the bonus but you can still go to Lending Club’s home page to apply for a loan.)

Peer-to-peer, or social lending, allows investors to provide money directly to worthy borrowers.

By cutting out banks — the traditional and rather costly middle-man for most loans — investors can earn a greater return on their savings while borrowers pay less for the privilege of using that money.

Lending Club says its net annualized return for its investors has been over 9.5% since 2007 (including losses from defaults), and borrowers pay up to 30% less than they would for similar loans at traditional financial institutions.

The Web site charges a processing fee that runs from 1.25% to 4.25% of the amount you’re borrowing, which is subtracted from the loan proceeds prior to disbursement.

But there’s no application fee. So if you don’t get your money, you don’t pay a thing.

The online application process is fast — Lending Club claims it takes just 3 minutes — but you’ll need a minimum FICO score of 660 and maximum debt-to-income ratio of 25% (not including a mortgage) to qualify.

Applications are assigned one of 35 grades from creditworthiness (from A1 for the best credit to G5 for the worst) with the grade determining the interest rate.
Information about your loan (without your name, of course) is then posted for investors to review and fund.

Even if you have great credit, investors will only provide a portion of your loan — as little as $25 in some cases — to limit their losses if you default.

Don’t be surprised if it takes scores of investors to fully fund your loan.
That’s how the system works.

Lynne Curtain, one of these icons for ostentatious spending had been evicted from her Orange County, Calif., home over $12,000 in unpaid rent and damages.

Now the gossip site TMZ.com reports that a judge in Riverside County, Calif., has issued a bench warrant for Curtain and her husband after they failed to appear in court over $1.2 million they had been ordered to pay a former business partner.

Their excuse?

“I just sort of forgot to go because of the Christmas season,” Frank Curtain told Radar.com.

The bench warrant doesn’t mean cops are out to arrest the couple. It won’t become active as long as they remember to show up at another hearing before Jan. 27th.

But can you see my eyes roll from here?

I’m not a rich woman. I make a decent but not exorbitant living. I own a small house. I have some student loans to pay back but I also have modest savings that are growing.

How is it that little ol’ Jen Stryker can be worth more than these Bravo bitches?

Oh, that’s right. Because I live within my means.

It doesn’t matter the size of those means. I am within them: I bought a house I could afford, and I didn’t keep refinancing to use it as a bank. I chose a college with a tuition that wouldn’t put me over my head in debt. I continue to drive a late model Honda Civic with almost 100,000 miles on it.

Do I buy new things?

Sometimes. I probably spent too much at Loehmann’s last weekend. But all my furniture is used, and I still haven’t put new curtains on my windows because the ones that the previous owners left behind are just fine.

Is someone like me — or you, dear reader — supposed to feel sorry for these women? For someone who pays for a facelift when she can’t pay her rent? Or someone who kvetches about selling her cars and jewelry because she doesn’t have cash to pay her mortgage?

Am I callous to revel in their failure? Maybe.

But you won’t get any boo-hooing from me. This is their hole. They dug it. They chose to put the cameras in their faces.

I will watch them try to dig out, and hope that somewhere, the show serves as a lesson that living high on borrowed money does not make you wealthy.

Way too big, according to a new book by psychiatrist David Kreuger.

We use money to “alter our moods, increase our self-esteem, and control others,” Kreuger says. “We use money to try to soothe emotional pains and to buy the respect of others and ourselves.”

But, as your mom (not to mention the Beatles) always told you, money can’t buy you love.

Recognizing and overcoming that destructive behavior is what The Secret Language of Money: How to Make Smarter Financial Decisions and Live a Richer Life (McGraw-Hill, $25.95) is all about.

This makes Secret Language the right book for right now: An easy-to-understand financial guide for all of those Americans trying to restore some balance in their lives after pigging-out out on easy credit.

In Krueger’s view, millions of consumers unconsciously try to spend their way to happiness.

When we allow emotions like that to rule our financial lives, we wind up spending more than we make, falling for every scam and speculative bubble that comes along, and plunging into debt.

(For a great example of how this can happen, see our post “Real Trouble For Bravo’s ‘Real Housewives.’”)

He takes money emotions down to the biological level, not necessarily to show us that our brains are to blame (he doesn’t let you blame anyone for your actions except yourself), but how to overcome gut reactions to make sound financial decisions.

The book isn’t perfect, but you can’t argue with its core message.