<prompt> Human: So my fiancee and I are buying a condominium together our first big purchase that we are doing together. We are in the final stages of closing and we just found out she has over 8k of collections on her TransUnion account sorry if I sound unprofessional with my terminology I am kind of new to this whole process.She had surgery back in 2011 under her mothers insurance and long story short her mother basically decided not to pay any outstanding bills my fiancee never even knew she had anything to pay. So now 7 or so years later our mortgage companies investor is basically asking her to pay off any debt before they can approve the close. It is a non-warrantable condominium so we have had to jump through hoops during the whole process with this investor.She put a letter of explanation together that we sent yesterday to our mortgage company basically saying she had no knowledge of these collections and they are stale. The collection agency is located in Washington State where she is from before moving to NY and they have to now transfer the collection to a company in NY before we can even look into it.Sorry for the long post but this whole process is very frustrating and I want to know what options we have. Is there a way to lower the debt? Does it go away after 7 years? We just want to close but there is no way we can afford 8k on top of all the closing costs and our 20 down payment :.EDIT: We decided to remove her name from the mortgage and just use me. Thanks for all the help everyone in this thread!Assistant: It will go away after 7 years, but it sounds like it probably wont go away until sometime in 2018. If your lender is requiring you to take care of these, your three choices are a try and find another lender b take care of them or c wait until they age off her credit report.You can try to call them and negotiate a settlement. Its highly likely theyll take much much much less than 8k. However, whatever they forgive ie you owe 8k, they take 2k to settle and forgive 6k youll have to pay income tax on come next April.Human: d take fiancee off of the loan if you can qualify aloneAssistant: That was another option we were debating. I just dont know how far back that will set us for closing. To give a picture; we were supposed to close June 23rd it is now almost a month later and each week we are having another issue. Mostly with our lender but now we are holding it up with this credit issue and its pretty embarrassing for us.  <response>: My original closing date for my current house was June 13th last year. We actually closed in Late August 2 months late. I think there were extensions every 2 weeks or so. Dont stress about closing dates. Extensions are easy to add on. Plus the seller knows that theyd have to start the process all over again to go with a different buyer, so dont take any flack from them about the dates either. Its nothing that either of you can control, its just part of the process. 