How to Remove a Collection from Your Credit Report
It’s quite beneficial for you to know how to delete a collection from your credit report and to do so as soon as possible. Collections are quite damaging to a credit report and can remain there for a period of up to seven years. It’s true that they become less damaging the longer they remain on the report, but they will still cause a great deal of problems as long as they exist.
Start by checking over all collection debts listed on your credit report. Sometimes, debts are mistakenly listed which are not yours. If you find such errors, submit a credit report dispute to the credit bureaus and ask them to review and remove the errant debts.
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For debts that do belong to you where the creditor or collection agency has contacted you within a 30 day period, you can ask the creditor to validate the debt. By doing so, they are obligated by law to provide you with documented proof that the debt is yours. Often times, they will not respond to your request or cannot validate the debt. In this case, you can contact both the creditor and the credit bureau asking the debt to be removed.
Once any delinquent debt has passed the seven year statute of limitation period, it can be removed from your report. It is critical, however, that if you have been delinquent for a long period of time that you do not make any further payments. When a payment is made on a delinquent debt, the statute of limitations resets to seven more years from the payment date.
It is common procedure that when debts have been delinquent for more than six months, they are sold or assigned to a collection agency. If this has happened one or more times, it is possible that the name of the agency listed on the report is not current. When this is the case, these debts can often be deleted by bringing this to the attention of the credit bureaus as it is the responsibility of each collector to update the report.
For other debts which cannot so easily be deleted, you have the option to contact and negotiate a debt settlement with the collector. Settlements of pennies on the dollar can often be negotiated with the agreement that you pay the smaller amount off in one lump sum, or very rapidly. If you do this, be sure to get everything in writing before making any payments.
