Jeanne: Bankruptcy is not going to harm it in a way that they think it is that having bad credit has harmed you worse but there’s a particular scam called credit repair that I advise people to avoid. The service they purport to offer doesn’t really exist. I love the Federal Trade Commission website. They do have a lot of really good consumer protection information on it. One piece of advice they offer, and this is from the attorneys at the Federal Trade Commission and Nation’s Consumer Protection Agency, is that they have never encountered a legitimate credit repair operation.
Any Information That Can Be Amended on your Credit Report Can Be Done by Yourself and Free of Charge
Anything they can do to your credit report, you can do for free. So when you receive information by attorneys who are in the business of consumer protection and they have never seen a legitimate credit repair place, I would heed that advice. What is helpful to keep in mind is that your credit history is a history. You can’t change history.
Now, certain things you can do, you can take incorrect and inaccurate information off and quite frankly, there’s about 70% of all people’s credit reports have some kind of inaccuracies. There might be something simple like your name is misspelled but you can take off inaccuracies yourself.
However, if you actually have bad credit, that history is a list that you missed over 30 days of payments here and 60 days here and 120 days here. If that’s true, you can’t take it off your credit report. No one can and so, whoever would promise you that they can, are scamming you.
Is Your Credit Score Doomed If You Have One Instance of Late Payment?
Interviewer: If I did miss 30 days making a payment and that’s on my credit report but I have that account open for many more years. Is that late payment ever going to fall off?
One Late Payment Will Have Little or No Effect on Your Credit and Will Be Erased after Seven Years
Jeanne: That late payment is a bad credit and in seven years it will come off. After three or four years, it will fail to have any effect on your credit. It will still be there but if that’s the only thing that’s wrong with your credit report, nobody’s going to care about that. Bad credit stays on your credit report for seven years but as it gets closer towards seven years, it has less and less effect. If you do not pay a $500 credit card, six and a half years later, it’s having little to no impact on your credit report even though it’s still technically there.
