Luckily, it is possible to remove something from your credit report before 7 years. In fact, it’s smart to remove negative items from your credit report if you’re trying to clean up your credit for a mortgage or car loan.
Or perhaps the negative entries are just bothering you!
Whether you’re dealing with late payments, collections, charge offs, or foreclosures, these effective techniques will clean up your credit report rather quickly.
How Can I Remove Negative Entries From My Credit Report?
Here are 4 effective ways to remove negative items from your credit report:
- Check for Inaccuracies & Submit A Credit Dispute Letter
- Write A Goodwill Letter Asking To Remove The Negative Entry
- Negotiate With The Creditor & “Pay For Delete”
- Have A Credit Professional Remove The Negative Item
Check For Inaccuracies & Submit A Credit Dispute Letter
Before you try anything else, you should first make sure the negative entry on your credit report doesn’t have any inaccuracies. Studies have shown that most people’s credit reports contain errors.
The trick here is to look for any errors whatsoever on each negative entry. Just because the entry itself is accurate doesn’t mean the details about the entry on your credit report don’t contain errors.
In fact, you’ll find out that it most likely does.
The first step is to get a copy of your credit report and closely look over each entry and check each detail against your records.
You should check the following things:
- Account number
- Balance
- Date opened
- Account status (e.g., Closed)
- Payment status (e.g., Collection)
- High Balance
- Credit Limit
- Anything else that appears to be inaccurate
Every time you find an error, note what is inaccurate along with the accurate value. Then you can proceed with a credit dispute letter. You’ll want to write a detailed dispute letter that outlines everything you have found. You will send this letter to the credit agencies asking them to correct the inaccuracies or remove the entry.
The best part is that many times they can’t verify each detail about the entry, so it’s removed.
Write A Goodwill Letter Asking To Remove The Negative Entry
If disputing the negative entry doesn’t work (that is, either there weren’t any errors or the credit agencies verified them as accurate), your next step should be writing the creditor or collection agency asking them to remove the negative entry out of goodwill.
This is most effective when you’re trying to remove late payments, paid collections, or paid charge offs.
A goodwill letter is really easy to write and you can use my goodwill letter template as a starting point. You will basically explain your situation to the creditor or collection agency.
While this may seem like a long shot, you’d be surprised how often it works. This is especially true if you’re a current customer because they want to keep your business.
Negotiate “Pay For Delete”
If you have any unpaid collections or charge offs, the best way to get them removed is to negotiate with the creditor or collection agency and offer to pay the unpaid debt if they agree to delete the negative entry from your credit report.
This is very effective as long as you get everything in writing. Therefore, never do this over the phone.
Have a Credit Professional Remove the Negative Item
If you’re the type of person who would rather have a professional handle it and just be done dealing with it all on your own, I suggest you check out a company called Sky Blue Credit Repair.
Learn More: Read our full Sky Blue Review.
We have heard that they have helped a lot of our readers, and honestly, they usually get stuff removed a lot quicker. Check out their website here.
Clean Up Your Credit Report
Check out the following articles for each type of negative entry that you might like removed from your credit report.
- Collections
- Charge Offs
- Late Payments
- Bankruptcy
- Repossessions
- Foreclosures
- Judgments
- Medical Collections
- Hard Inquiries
- Tax Liens
