Collecting After the Holidays

Merry Christmas! Happy New Year! Happy Holidays! Each year, from Thanksgiving through the New Year, people tend to be in a more festive, optimistic, cheerful, and giving mood. This is all well and good, and it would be nice if the "festive, optimistic, and cheerful" spirit remained year-round. However, the "giving" component, while well intentioned, can come back to bite a lot of people after the first of the year.

"We deal with delinquencies throughout the year, but they become more frequent from December through February," notes an Ohio-based mortgage collection manager, who asked not to be identified. "Historically, January is the month when people start trying to recover from their December spending."

With this understanding, the department implements a concerted effort to keep borrowers on track during these sometimes lean times. "Our goal is to stem the tide of problems in January and February, so that borrowers don't end up as foreclosure candidates later on," he explains. This article looks at their strategy for coping with tougher collections after the holidays; how they support collectors, including extra incentives they offer. . . . (to read the remainder of this article, please log in below.)