Debt Solutions: Fixing Your Credit Report

Many people ask how to fix my credit? To be able to get rid of a collection from your credit report you are going to first need to educated yourself on what a collection is. If you have a bill that you suddenly stop paying on the company will continue to send you monthly statements each month waiting for payment. Normally after six months has passed without a payment your account will be sent into collections. There are some companies that will wait longer then that however six months is the usual time frame.

When an account is sent into collection it is usually the creditor’s last chance at trying to retrieve the money that is owed to them. It is at this point in time that the creditor has tried calling you to try and set up some type of repayment schedule and has also sent several notices through the mail to inform you that your bill is past due. There are many creditors have their own in house collection departments while other creditors will outsource their collection needs to outside collection agencies.

There are many occasions when an account that is overdue is sold off to collection companies for pennies of the dollar. Normally if the account is still maintained by the original creditor and they are working with a collection service they will be paying the collection service a portion of what is recovered.

Ok now that we have gone over that information let’s discuss how to remove a collection from your credit report.

To be able to remove an entry from your credit report that has gone into collections you are going to need to dispute the account. To do this you need to write a dispute letter to the credit bureau or bureaus that are reporting the account. You need to make sure that you are sending basically the same letter to each of the bureaus that are reporting the account that was in collection. The letter needs to identify the item that you are disputing and why you are disputing it.

When your letter reaches the credit bureau they will be opening an investigation. The bureau will then be contacting the creditor that made the entry and let them know the reason that you are challenging the account entry. The credit bureau will then ask the creditor to prove that the entry is valid.

If the debt that is being challenged is fairly old then the creditor may not have the documentation readily available. The documents are likely to be in storage somewhere. If this happens to be the case for your debt it is very likely that the company will not want to spend anymore time or money on your account. If this is what is occurring they will most likely not reply to the credit bureaus inquiry and the the credit bureau will then take the entry off of your credit report.

Now if the company does send the credit bureau proof of the entry that you are disputing this is what is referred to as being verified. This does not mean that you are out of luck 9in getting it removed from your credit report. What it means is that you are jus going to have to pay it off or attempt to negotiate a lower payoff amount. In order for you to be able to remove the entry in this case you need to negotiate it being removed from your credit report as part of the payoff agreement.