Clear Out-of-date Information from Your Credit Report
A credit report is a certificate of your reliability as a customer, as a debtor and an indicator of your income and economic stability. The business houses, credit companies and sometimes employers need to have a valid picture of your condition to be able to depend on you.
As a result it becomes indispensible to have a proper and updated credit report and also keep them as high scoring as possible. Certain information in our credit report produces a negative effect and some others have a positive effect. You have the right to get negative reports removed from your credit report after 7 ½ years according to the law. The positive reports must stay for 10 years but should be removed after that.
We often find our reports contain such unwanted elements that influence our credit score negatively and are present in our reports even after their permitted tenure. We need to take immediate action to remove them. Here are a few steps you could follow to get them removed early.
- Verify Credit reports: Get a credit report from all bureaus and check them for errors or out dated information. Each report has to be judged separately and the faulty items marked properly
- Check: First you need to locate the closing dates of each closed transaction in the report and add about 10 years to that to determine the date of removal of the item.
- Charge-Offs: A charge-off occurs when a credit company writes off an unpaid debt because of tax reasons and declares it delinquent. This is a negative report and must be removed 7 ½ years after it has been introduced.
- Collection account: This is introduced when you fail to pay a creditor for a period of six months or more at a stretch. The creditor sells off the account to a Collection agent and this leads to an addition of a negative impact on the report. This is also got rid off after 7 ½ years.
- Mark or Highlight: Make copies of the credit reports and highlight the erroronous information and send it to the bureau.
- Communicate the problems made: Inform the bureau about the errors and request them to delete all the inaccurate items and prepare a proper report.
- Mail the Letters: The letters of complaints should be mailed to the bureaus and they are sure to bring responses for the concerned authorities within a month. The bureaus are bound by law to send responses and rectify the mistakes.
Your Credit Report is sure to become error free and clear of obsolete items quite easily.