How to Remove a Judgment From Your Credit Report

A negative judgment can be disputed, whether you’ve corrected the situation or not.

Image: consumercredit

(SALEM, Ore.) - If you want to know how to remove a negative judgment from your credit report, good for you. It sounds like you’ve had some choppy financial waters in the past, but you are moving past them and are trying to recover from the damage to your credit report and credit score.

These things don’t correct themselves (well...they do, but not in the time frame you want to work with), so you are right to step in and take matters into your own hands. So how do we get rid of these negative judgments anyway?

First of all, let’s explain the situation a little better. When we talk about “negative judgments”, we’re referring to a record of all the times you screwed up in your credit life.

Your credit history is recorded by three different companies. These companies are called Credit Reporting Agencies. Who do they report to? All of the companies that might one day lend you their money.

You see, lenders can’t look into your bank account to see how much money you have. They also can’t look back in time to see how well you repaid other lenders. So they rely on Credit Reporting Agencies to tell them all the times you missed a payment or borrowed more money than you can handle.

The CRAs encapsulate your history in a three digit score (Your credit score) and this score serves as a signal for companies to know how much to give you and how much to charge you for it.

A complete record of your creditworthiness is kept by each of the three companies in your credit reports (one for each of the companies: TransUnion, Equifax, and Experian).

Having three different companies tracking this stuff means that one company can’t blackmail you by lying about your credit history; the records of the other two companies would call them out on their lie.

On the other hand, having more that one company tracking this stuff makes them more likely to catch you in a mistake.

When you check your credit report, you’ll see a lot of good items, but you might see some negative judgments as well. These judgments are for proven times that you didn’t pay back a debt on time, or you used too much debt, or you applied to a bunch of credit cards at once, or you did anything else that made you look like you were panicking financially.

If you see one of these judgments, you can dispute it, whether you’ve corrected the situation or not.

The CRA is required to check back with all of the records that created this negative item. This requires them to get new information from the original lenders, who may not be bothered to participate.

In this case, the item might just disappear on its own. On the other hand, if the debt is significant, it could re-motivate a lender to come after you again.

It’s best to dispute an item only when it represents a small debt, or when you have already repaid the debt. In this last case, the dispute will always see the item removed. If you don’t do anything, your negative judgments will all disappear from your record after seven years. If you can’t wait that long, there are still things you can do.

Source: Salem-News.com Special Features Dept.