Why You Should Pursue Money Owed to You

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When people or businesses owe you money, it should be a priority to collect on those debts. The longer you let a debt go uncollected, the harder it will be to recover. 

This also applies to opportunities you have to recover funds that you are owed.

Money owed to you is yours

Not collecting money you are owed is no different than withdrawing money from your bank account, leaving it on the ground in a parking lot, and walking away. Someone else is going to benefit at your expense.

That’s exactly what happens when you don’t collect the money you are rightfully owed. Instead of you benefitting from the funds, the person who owes you gets all the rewards. It’s one less bill for them to pay and they’ll just spend the money on something else. If you aren’t going to collect on the debt, you may as well have handed them cash for free.

Here are some of the easiest ways to recover money that is rightfully yours.

1. Follow through with warranty claims

You’ve probably bought something that came with a warranty, but have you ever pursued a claim? You might be surprised to learn how much money you can recover just by filing warranty claims. For instance, by using fleet management software from Cetaris, Gulf Relay was able to increase their warranty reimbursements by 782%. Formerly, their warranty tracking system was seeing opportunities slip through the cracks. When they finally got organized, they saw a massive increase in recovered funds.

Warranties exist for a reason: to reimburse you for the cost of repairing or replacing a product. You shouldn’t have to foot the bill for a manufacturer’s defect or anything covered under the warranty. In fact, suppliers actually increase the cost of an item to account for the potential repairs covered under the warranty, which means when you buy the item, you’re already paying ahead of time for those repairs. You may as well collect those reimbursements.

2. Ask that friend to pay you back

We’ve all lent money to friends who seem to conveniently forget to pay us back. Whether it’s $20, $200, or $5,000, they owe you that cash. Don’t hesitate to ask your friends to pay you back. They may not have the money on hand, so give them the option of making payments.

If you really want to get serious, you can collect on interest they agreed to pay you at the time of the loan, but if it’s been a long time since you lent them the money, pushing for interest might stress your friendship.

There are plenty of reasons friends skip out on debt. Some never planned to pay you back in the first place, while others consider the situation casual and not a real commitment. Some people even expect you to forget about it after a while.

Good friends won’t leave you hanging when they owe you a debt. If your friends are flaky and refuse to honor their word, avoid lending the money in the future unless you’re okay with never getting it back.

3. Unpaid wages

You might be shocked to learn that millions of people likely have unpaid wages owed to them in the form of unpaid overtime, regular pay, vacation time, confiscated tips, bonuses, and more.

Some employers implement shady, illegal practices to shave off the amount of money they have to pay employees. For instance, some retail business owners will pay their closing employees only until a certain time, but still require them to work until their tasks are complete. For instance, they might get paid until 8:15 p.m., but it takes until 8:30 p.m. to close. In this situation, every day they close, they are owed 15 minutes of pay and can collect through the labor board or a lawsuit.

If you aren’t being paid the full amount of wages you are owed, it’s worth pursuing because if you worked, your employer must pay you even if that work was not approved. There’s also a good chance you might receive penalties on top of the wages you’re owed.

Collect when money is owed to you

You can probably use some extra cash from time to time, so don’t let debts and unrecovered funds fall to the wayside. You have every right to collect on the money you’re rightfully owed.

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