Your past financial mistakes stay as negative remarks on your credit report for several years. But the mistake may not be yours always. You can be wrongly marked by the lender or the credit bureau. Either way you are the one getting affected. Here are some ways you can remove unfavourable credit report entries from your credit report.
Submit a Dispute to your Lender
You can easily file for a credit report dispute through postal mail or online. If you want to submit a dispute online, then you must have recently collected a copy of your credit report. You can submit the dispute to your lender with enough proof supporting it.
If you want to dispute via mail, then draft a letter describing the credit report and submit copies of any proof you have. The lender makes the enquiry and will update the credit bureaus if there are any mistakes. If they have made an error they will remove it.
Make a Goodwill Request for Resolution
If you’ve already paid the account, but the payments were delayed, you can ask the lender for a goodwill deletion. Draft a letter to your lender, describing why you were late, state how you’ve since been a good paying customer, and ask that the accounts be reported more favorably. Again, creditors don’t have to comply and some won’t. On the other hand, some creditors will resolve it if your payments have been on time recently.
Wait Out the Credit Reporting Time Limit
Your last resort is to wait for these negative collections to fall off your credit report automatically. As per guidelines, negative information on credit reports can stay for several years. And in case of bankruptcy it can stay upto ten years. And the older the information the less impact it has on your credit report as you replace it with positive information.
Additional Reading: How To Clean Up Your Credit Report