Your credit report has tons of information reporting on it.
Therefore, that leaves a lot of areas open to confusion.
One of the greatest enemies to your credit score are collection accounts.
Majority of the times, these are old medical bills, cell phone contracts, cable agreements, and even utility bills that allegedly never got paid to the original creditors that are either contracted or sold to debt collection companies.
What these debt collectors do is report the information on your credit report, which causes your score to drop tremendously.
Sometimes, 25-75 points per collection account.
Their strategy is once they report it on your credit report it will cause you to call them to make arrangements to pay the alleged debt in full or monthly.
What many people actually believe is that once it’s paid, it will do one of two things, be removed or go to paid status, improving their score.
But what many people fail to realize is, debt collectors could care less about your credit and never remove the account, and whether a collection account shows paid or unpaid on your credit report, it still has the same negative effect on your score.
Resulting in no change to your score.
But, I have good news.
The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act protects you from debt collectors who don’t follow the rules.
All debts reported on your credit report must be 100% accurate, 100% verifiable, and 100% timely.
What that means to you is, if a debt collector cannot prove the validity of your alleged debts, they are not allowed to report it on your credit report and must cease all efforts to collecting it as well.
So, how is this helpful to you.
By simply listing all the collection accounts that are on your credit report and send each collection agency a Debt Validation letter, you are increasing the chances of having that debt removed from your credit report because they must PROVE that it’s yours.
Doing this puts you in a position of power and catches your enemies off guard because they doubted your ability to fight back!