Please help

[thomper]

What is the name of your state?What is the name of your state?Nebraska

Here is my situation. Three others and myself have been sent a collection letters regarding three months of cable bills from the owners of a house we lived in. The agreement between the owners and us was verbal; actually there was no agreement between the owners and us everything was communicated from the owners to the son then to us. The son of the owners lived with us during this time. The original agreement was to pay $100 a month for rent and the bills would be spilt equally. After we had moved in during the first month the rent was raised to $125 a month. The bills were mailed to the owners of the house and their son. The amount each person owed was posted on a dry erase board. We thought we were friends with the owners so we took their word on how much we owed without seeing the bills themselves.
After a period of about a year the four of us decided to move on. Once we told the owners of our plans to move out the owners said that we owed them for the first three months of cable bills. After asking many times and three months later the owners sent me all the utilities and cable bills for the time we lived in the house. I have copies of all the checks that I had written for rent and all bills, but the problem is that many of the months of utilities and cable bills were added together. Also, the first check for rent and bills wasn't written until three months after living there. This causes a problem for me to match what I paid to what each bill amounted to for each time period.

My questions are: Will having a jumbled mess of checks that are hard to match to the months affect me disputing the amount owed if anything is owed? Do I have any recourse for the owners breaking the original agreement of $100 a month then raising it to $125? Also can this be resolved without going to court or affecting my credit? One person has offered to pay half of what is owed to get this over with but they will not accept anything less than 100 percent.

Any information you have will be much appreciated. If there is a website or other place of information regarding such issues that would be very helpful if you could point me in the right direction.

Thank You.