Introducing myself.

While your scores aren't great they aren't terrible either. But given your facts I would not do any more shopping for another year almost no matter what. All you would do is further degrade your score. The reason is that you are not likely to get rid of all lates unless you happen to get lucky and after a year of good on time payments a late won't kill you with a mortgage lender in most cases. Can't be any unpaid balances anywhere. Now then, I'm not saying you can't get rid of lates or unpaids because it's done all the time but the lates are sometimes more difficult if it is reported by a current creditor.

Its possible.

Thats a real killer for sure.

I have seen a $6 million dollar IRS tax lien go bye-bye and many other debts well above $100,000 go too so what would $700 amount to? And I've also seen zero balance ones be real tough to get rid of. So that just points out that you never can tell. Most of the time the balance actually makes no difference at all.

Well, thats nice of them, isn't it? But was it paid off after they charged it off or before? That would make a difference in how it was reported. It would also make a difference in how you might want to go about attacking the problem.

Yes, a simple dispute letter should get rid of that one. You should not have to invent any of the "not mine" lies to get it off. Just dispute it with a simple letter stating you think its past the SOL and should be removed and that should take care of it. On second glance you said it was opened in 95 so I now have to say its not likely to be past SOL. It would be judged past sol based on when you missed the payment that ended up causing it to become a chargeoff.

Maybe. You can try the standard spamming tricks on them and see what happens.

Good thing you paid that MBNA card. They just love to send people over to Wolpoff & Abrahamson who then love to take it to arbitration where you have almost zero rights and even less chance of getting a fair hearing. Its a foregone conclusion that they will get an award against you unless you really know what you are doing and how to handle arbitration and probably even then.

Next thing you know you will get a letter either telling you they are filing suit to reduce the award to a judgment or that they have sold it to somebody else. They will bug you to death until well after the award is granted them and then you get a letter from some other bimbo telling you they bought the debt and are filing suit if W&A hasn't already done it. Once its been reduced to a judgment its all downhill from there. And of course the costs of the arb company are added in too making the situation even more horrible.

One famous and well respected internet glueru just loves to advise people to send W&A a full cease & desist letter and refuse to deal with them. (LOL) Well, the results of listening to the advice of that loose cannon aren't funny at all. Arbitration isn't talked about here very much if at all and if its court ordered arbitration that gets real sticky but at least its court approved and court monitored, not that such a watchful eye is going to change the outcome any.

Your problems aren't that bad but its likely to take maybe a year before you can resolve them and get a mortgage, especially if you have trouble with those lates. If you can spam them off the rest should be a piece of cake.

But you want to be careful about getting too many off. You might even want to be sure that old one from 95 stays right there if it don't have a big balance on it. Thats because if you get rid of too many you can end up with almost no score at all and look like some kind of new baby coming down the pike with little or no credit history at all and if you let that happen you are going to have to use some special credit building tactics just to buy a sub at the local deli on credit.