Been talking to my mom about all the success I've had here for myself and my girlfriend. Finally talked her into looking at her own reports just to make sure everything is on-the-level. Aside from some incorrect Personal Info which I am confident I can fix for her, it seems mom was 30 days late twice. Tsk, tsk...and after all those talks she gave me as a kid about money management. She's not "computing machine" savvy so I'm here on her behalf. Here is the situation: -----------------Opened-----Closed-------Derog-----------Limit HSBC Card-------12/05-------02/07------30 DL 06/06------Was $2000 HSBC Card-------08/07-------xopenx-----30 DL 04/08------Opened at $750 ----------------------------------------------------------dropped to $300 -----------------------------------------------------------for inactivity I'm sure the CRAs will verify if she goes that route since she was, indeed, late. But I'm not sure about a Good Will Letter either. She doesn't really use her current card (as you see above) so I figure she doesn't really have any leverage to ask for a good will adjustment. QUESTIONS 1) Should she dispute through CRAs then try a Good Will Letter or go straight to the Good Will Letter since they are legit 30 DL? 2) Should I only dispute the open account since if I succeed, she might lose the whole TL on the first card through deletion (no sense throwing away history that was 95% good)?
You can dispute the late entries by themselves, so you don't have to worry about losing the entire TL. A goodwill letter won't change the results of a dispute. I'd do the letter first.
But if she does the good will letter first, she'd be admitting her mistake. If it doesn't work and she tries the CRA dispute won't HSBC tell the CRAs, "hey, this crazy old broad just asked us to delete it 'cause she made a mistake. Now she's telling you guys she was never late. Something is fishy"?
Well, I doubt CRAs work that way. Remember that while this is her personal credit and it's a pretty big deal to her, she's just another database entry to the CRAs. They could not possibly care less about the how and way of the 30-day, and they certainly aren't going to spend the time conversing with someone at HSBC over any letters she may have sent. My guess is that if the CRAs even query HSBC at all, it's going to be a simple electronic communication, lumped in with hundreds if not thousands of other queries for the month. At least, that's my guess. I could be wrong. But imagine the number of active records Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax have -- I can't see them spending any notable amount of time on any one issue. Time is money, and the CRAs don't make a dime off you (they DO make money off your information, but that's besides the point). And even if they do find out about the letter, so what? What's the worst that could happen? So some overseas employee at Experian's call center is going to smirk to themselves, and that's that. The worst case scenario is that they'd keep the 30-day on the report, which IMHO, they'll probably do regardless. I could be completely wrong on all of this. The CRAs may work completely differently than every other company that deals with hundreds of millions of consumers. But when you think about how many queries they must get on a daily basis, I just can't imagine anyone at a CRA picking up the phone and calling over to HSBC to chat about an account. EDIT: Also, the reason I suggested the letter first is that if you do a dispute first, it is conceivable (though I have no idea how likely) that HSBC could flag the account as having had some information disputed. This would stem from the CRAs contacting HSBC to verify the information. OTOH, if she does the goodwill letter, and if HSBC contacts the CRAs, then as far as the CRAs are concerned it will be because of HSBC's "mistake". I may sound paranoid on some of these posts, but I previously worked in large-scale call center management. We're talking about companies with 50+ million customers. The volume of automated data mining that goes on behind the scenes is frightening. No piece of information is too small; these guys devour this stuff.
Sorry Al but, you're wasting your time with HSBC. However, they will mark it as being in dispute if you go the CRA route and this generally takes the accounts out of FICO's scoring models.
