Hi, my name is Urbanite, and I was once credit-inept. I have been lurking the boards for months and reading, studying and praying (this method is not mentioned here, but I figure I will pioneer it) in hopes to restore my credit scores. Anyway, my question. My reports are mainly littered with late pays (history - once tried a consumer consolidation company, they paid my bills when they felt like it as opposed to when they were due, hence the late pays). I was going to begin my approach to removing these late pays (most are from 1999-2001) by sending goodwill letters. My question is this. If I try this and say "my late pays were caused by XX life event..I'm so sorry...please please please remove" and they don't remove, then am I later banned from disputing through the CRAs as never late? It seems that my letter might provide the OCs with the evedince to later verify that I did in fact pay late because of XXX life event. I'm sure to you experts this is a novice question...my advanced apologies. Urbanite
Welcome Urbanite. IMO, your thought process is correct. CRAs often pretend that they didn't receive your letter on this day or that. All they know is that the TL is verified, blah, blah. A goodwill letter might work if you're trying to establish credit with a cc issuer, but may not go very far with a CRA. Case in point. While negotiating a possible settlement with a CRA, I happened to see letters in their file that they never responded to. It's a good thing my story never changed, otherwise I'd have lost all creditiblity in court. In addition to leaving a paper trail, you also want to be careful of having your account re-aged. These CRAs really don't look at the substance of correspondence. Rather, they take your well-thought out and heartfelt letter and try to attach the most applicable code to it for the purpose of data entry. So in theory, you could say "I lost a limb in a work-related accident and haven't been able to devote any attention to any of my debts". The genius at the CRA could simply reduce that down to "disputes under FCBA/Note mine". Once they investigate and verify that it is yours, they may very well adjust the DOLA.
