My Current Credit State Of Affairs

Like many others in this country of ours I have descended into credit hell. I went through a nasty divorce from October of 2003 until January of 2005 that left me pretty much in financial ruin and as a result my credit, that I had spent the last 15 years building to "A" status, was decimated. This blog is going to be documenting my attempt at repairing my credit rating, and hopefully anybody that reads this can gain some information to battle their own credit demons.

Up until 2 days ago I had no idea as to where my credit truly stood, I knew it was very bad, but did not know how bad. I pulled all three of my credit reports by going online to annualcreditreport.com, here you can get a free copy of each of your credit reports once a year. It was bad.

Equifax:

22 Accounts in good standing (This is mostly old credit and is deceiving because accounts paid or current with late payments are included here.)
3 Accounts past due
7 Accounts with a negative account history
91 Late payments (Some of the accounts in good standing fall into this)
8 Collections or Charge-offs

TransUnion:

22 Adverse Accounts
14 Satisfactory Accounts
47 Late payments
13 Collections or Charge-offs

Experian:

14 Derogatory Accounts
21 Satisfactory Accounts
28 Late payments
14 Collections or Charge-offs

I reviewed the personal information, you should really check this good. Experian had my birthdate wrong and they had a previous address listed for a place that I never lived. These cannot be corrected online, they can only be corrected via mail and they will want proof. DL or something like that. Equifax had a wrong address and two social security numbers that weren't mine. TransUnion had address wrong. This wrong address appeared on all 3 credit reports, I have no clue where this came from.

I then used the online dispute forms for all 3 credit agencies. I was told by someone that has done this before to not dispute more than 4 or 5 items at a time. I logged on to Experian and filled out their dispute form. I figured the way to start would be to eliminate problems I absolutely knew were wrong or had no knowledge of. I showed 2 late payments from Capital One, 11/03 and 02/04, I disputed saying I was never late paying. I hear Capital One is very hard to get them to budge, so we will see. There was a WF Finance account that showed 2 late payments for 03/03 and 04/03. I had no idea what this account was let alone the fact the it was late, it was a $500 revolving account. I noticed it was a joint account with my EX. No doubt one of her accounts she opened behind my back. Nevertheless it was in good standing besides the late payments and it was a closed account. There was an item from ProCollect for a $250 collection, come to find out this was an apartment complex where I lived for a short time when I moved from Florida to Texas. No idea what they are charging me $250 for, I bet this collection agency doesn't have very good records so it is a good target to dispute. I also noticed there was a Citibank account that was showing as paid in full and showed good payment history, but was listed as a charge-off. I know this was paid off in full in good standing in 4/2001. So I disputed this item as well. These were my inital disputes with Experian. This will take around 30 days from what they say to find out the "verdict". I have read a lot from people that say the online disputes don't work, it is worth a try because it is a way to get the ball rolling immediately. If it only gets one off, it was worth it. One piece of advice I was given is that if you are challenging late payments with the credit reporting agency, a lot of times they will just delete the whoel account from your credit report, if this account was in good standing besides the lates it could hurt you with the deletion. I made a note on my dispute to not delete the account.

Next I went to the Equifax dispute link. Come to find out in my region Equifax is managed by CSC Services, so I was re-directed to their site. I saw that the same WF Financial account was listed, but it only showed a $5 high limit and it showed the 2 late payments. I challenged the 2 lates. The Citibank card was also listed here as a charge-off, so I challenged this to get it to say "paid in full as agreed". Washington Mutual had listed 2 late payments, this was one of my old mortgages, I simply challenged the late payments as to never being late. The Capital One was listed as well with 2 lates, so I challenged these. Again, I made a note on the late disputes to not delete the account.

Finally, I pulled up the TransUnion dispute page and challenged the same ones I challenged previously.

One last thing I did to close out my battle for the day was to send a debt validation e-mail to a collection agency that is named NCO Financial. I have a collection account listed on my TransUnion report for $81, it is some sort of medical bill. I have no clue. I have heard that NCO generally deletes the account from the credit reports once they have been asked to validate the debt. I will get more into debt validation at a later date, because that is the number one weapon vs the collection agencies.

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