Hey, Melinda, I feel your pain. Here's a good horror story for you.

In 1999-2000, I did TONS of work for a "Nationwide" (infer what you will) title & appraisal company. They always paid on time, no problems. All of a sudden, March of 2000 rolls around, and I'm owed over $9,000.00 by this company. (did I say a TON of work, that was a drop in the bucket compared to what they had paid in the past..kept me busy enough not to notice when they got behind..my own fault). When I cut this company off for non-payment, they said, wait a minute, all of these searches have been paid. They sent me a copy of the check they had paid for the searches with. Well well, the check had another abstractor's name on it; said abstractor just HAPPENS to be their registered agent here in Florida (don't know if he still is). They admitted their error, and said they would collect the money from this abstractor & pay me up. They paid the bill down to about $6,670.00, but never did re-pay the rest. After numerous consultations with and collection letters from my attorney, the President of this company still refused to pay. My attorney informed me that since they have no assets in Florida, it would cost me more to file in PA than what they owed me.

I ended up writing this off as a bad debt, but would have saved myself a lot of time & trouble is I had paid closer attention to my receivables. Now, if a large customer gets into me for more than $1,000.00, I watch their bill VERY closely, so I don't get stuck holding the bag again for that huge sum of money.