The more serious the derogatory item on your credit report, the harder it will be for your credit repair company to get it completely removed. They will likely find that correctly reported collections and charge offs can only be removed by the use of tactic number three above with a Pay for Delete compromise.
This is the only real leverage that you have with accounts that are so delinquent that they have already been charged off and/or sent out to a third party collections agency. Your credit repair service can offer to make the full original past due payment amount (trying to negotiate away some of the charges and late fees in the process) in exchange for them striking all associated negative account remarks from your credit report.
Again, this will be much easier to negotiate for simple late payments than it will be for charge offs and especially collection accounts (which are doubly reported negatively under both charge offs and as collection accounts).
Removal of Bankruptcies
No matter how good a credit repair company may be, it is not possible for them to get a discharged bankruptcy removed from your credit files. These simply have to fall off after the stipulated from seven to 10 years time frame. They can get inaccurate information concerning the bankruptcy updated and amended however.
You should check over this section of your credit report and consult with your credit repair company to see if any information needs to be corrected here. Bankruptcies on credit reports may seem like they are permanent fixtures, but their impact becomes less damaging with every passing year from the date of discharge.
Removal of Repossessions and Foreclosures
Repossessions pertain to loans on cars, trucks, and boats, while foreclosures relate to houses on whose mortgage you have defaulted. In both cases, the credit repair company knows that your best chances of getting these devastating derogatory remarks removed from your credit report center on challenging the original creditor to verify and validate the debt. Thanks to the Global Financial Crisis of a decade ago, many of the original lenders went bankrupt themselves.
As a result, in the ensuing confusion, many mistakes were made and a huge number of original documents were lost forever. If your lender on your loan or mortgage is long gone, then your credit repair company has a decent chance of successfully challenging the creditor to produce the original debt documents. If they can not show original signed applications or other original proof of the debt, then they will have no choice but to contact the credit bureaus and have these accounts removed from your reports entirely.
Removal of Judgments
Thanks to that rarest of occurrences when the three major credit bureaus agreed on providing relief to consumers (as they did back in 2017-2018), judgments and liens (including tax liens) no longer appear anywhere on your credit reports, nor do they impact your personal credit scores. There is no longer any need to have them removed. Just because they are not listed on your credit profile any longer does not mean that you do not still owe the debt. It also does not stop the creditors from trying to collect one way or another.
Removal of Inquiries
Legitimately listed hard inquiries on your credit reports can not be removed either by you or any credit repair organization. They will drop off naturally after no more than two years from the point when the requester pulled your credit reports originally. Until then, the best thing that you can do is to avoid making requests for additional credit and loans.
Deleting of Medical Bills
Delinquent medical bills have a lower impact on your credit score than they used to in both the FICO 9 and VantageScoring 4.0 models. For older models though, they still rank alongside delinquent credit accounts in their negative impacts on scores. Getting these removed from your credit report will require the credit repair company to use the four step process we outlined earlier in this chapter.
As a recap, this involves the following:
- Submit a Dispute of Inaccurate Information to the Three Credit Bureaus
- Submit a Dispute of Incorrect Information to the Original Creditor
- Make An Offer for a Pay for Delete Compromise
- Request a Goodwill Deletion if You Have Already Repaid the Debt
With medical bills that are delinquent, you can also request that your credit repair company make an Offer for a Settlement for Delete. You may not have the money to pay off the entire debt, but in many cases the creditor will be willing to negotiate in exchange for a partial payment of the debt in one lump sum amount.
It costs them nothing to delete the derogatory information from your medical account and gets them money back that they would likely never again see otherwise.
Deleting of Charged Off Accounts
The original creditor is the party that your credit repair company will have to approach directly about getting a charged off account deleted. In many cases, if this debt was correctly reported, the only way to get it removed will be in an offer to Pay the account in full in exchange for a deletion of derogatory items.
Many creditors will recognize that this is the only way in which they will be able to recover on an account that they have already given up on entirely.
Credit repair companies have years of experience in handling these kinds of negotiations and know the right buttons to push to get it done.
Deleting of Tax Liens
Fortunately for millions of consumers in the U.S. today, the credit bureaus automatically took care of the deleting of all tax liens in the years of 2017 and 2018. There are no longer any liens of any kind, nor even any public or private judgments of any kind (except bankruptcies) shown on any of your credit reports today.