Credit card firms Citigroup and American Express have released statistics on the August delinquencies in credit card payments, with Citi’s delinquency improving and American Express holding steady. Citi’s delinquency rate of 0.8% in August was an improvement from 0.87% in … Continue reading →
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Driving informed and empowered consumers through education is at the heart of Freddie Mac’s mission. To support our efforts and in celebration of the 20th anniversary of Freddie Mac’s CreditSmart®, we’re excited to announce we’ve relaunched our suite of free educational resources that are designed to provide consumers with the skills and knowledge to assist them through every stage of their financial capability and homeownership journey. CreditSmart helps to:
Develop lifelong money management skills.
Understand the homebuyer journey.
Build, restore and maintain good credit.
Qualify for a mortgage loan.
Successfully manage and sustain home investment.
CreditSmart delivers education through five unique learning paths, each offering a unique education experience: CreditSmart® Essentials, CreditSmart® Homebuyer U, CreditSmart® Coach, CreditSmart® Multilingual, and CreditSmart® Military.
The CreditSmart Suite
NEW! CreditSmart® Essentials
Offers a wide-ranging updated financial capability curriculum for consumers with unique learning modules focused on topics from credit and money management to disaster resilience.
Interactive user experience demystifies complex financial concepts.
Self-paced, personalized, mobile-optimized learning.
In English only.
Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) accessible.
CreditSmart® Homebuyer U
A comprehensive homeownership education course to help guide first-time homebuyers.
Offers interactive and multimedia features including videos, infographics, worksheets and calculators.
Completion of this course delivers a homebuyer education certificate required for Freddie Mac Home Possible® and Freddie Mac HomeOne® mortgage loans.
Mobile, tablet and computer friendly with user registration capabilities and customer support.
Available in English and Spanish.
CreditSmart® Coach – Coming Fall 2021
Bring the power of CreditSmart to your communities by becoming a certified facilitator. This interactive financial capability train-the-trainer program gives you the skills and resources to help your clients reach their financial goals.
Instructor-led training webinars, facilitator guide, support materials and customizable marketing resources to boost your promotional efforts.
Offered in English and Spanish.
CreditSmart® Multilingual
Providing the value of CreditSmart financial capability in Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean.
CreditSmart® Military
Addresses specific needs of military service members and Veterans.
Let us help you with tools and resources that deliver education into your hands. For more information visit CreditSmart.FreddieMac.com.
The post Freddie Mac Launches New CreditSmart® Suite of Educational Resources appeared first on NFCC.
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The Minnesota Department of Commerce has settled a regulatory action against John C. Heath, an attorney doing business as Lexington Law Firm, for violating the state’s laws on fees and registration requirements for credit services organizations. In May 2020, Lexington … Continue reading →
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The Federal Trade Commission is sending checks to 603 people who paid money they did not owe to a debt collector that used deceptive and abusive collection methods. In 2018, the FTC and State of New York alleged that Campbell … Continue reading →
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WASHINGTON — A Consumer Financial Protection Bureau order against a provider of income-share agreements signals regulatory tightening for all ISAs, but could also give the education finance sector legal clarity, observers said. ISAs offer tuition money in exchange for some … Continue reading →
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The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has recently come up with a rule that should help enhance transparency around loans for small businesses. The proposed rule would require lenders to collect and report all the relevant information about credit applications, such … Continue reading →
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On September 7, 2021, the CFPB announced that it had entered into a consent order with an education finance nonprofit (“nonprofit”) in connection with the nonprofit’s offering of income share agreements (“ISAs”). In the consent order, the CFPB asserted that … Continue reading →
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[August 25, 2021] OMAHA, Neb., Aug. 25, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — New market data published by The Strawhecker Group (TSG), the largest analytics and consulting firm focused on the payments acceptance industry, illustrates the strength of the U.S. economy. TSG data … Continue reading →
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One in 10 Buy Now Pay Later shoppers have been chased by debt collectors, rising to one in eight young people, Citizens Advice is warning. The charity’s latest research shows Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) shoppers were charged £39 million … Continue reading →
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Derogatory entries on your credit report, such as 30-day late payments, 60-day late payments, collections, and more, can seriously damage your credit score. Is there a way to get derogatory items removed from your credit report so that your score can bounce back? Let’s find out.
What Are Derogatory Entries on Your Credit Reports?
The term derogatory simply means negative, so derogatory items on your credit report are any items that reflect negatively on your credit. In other words, they indicate that you have failed to make timely payments on your debt.
Derogatory entries can be divided into two categories: minor derogatories and major derogatories. They both can hurt your credit substantially and contribute to bad credit, but major derogatory items have a greater negative impact on your credit score than minor derogatory items.
Examples of Derogatory Items on Your Credit Reports
Minor Derogatory Entries
30-day late payments
60-day late payments
Major Derogatory Entries
90, 120, 150-day late payments, etc.
Charge-offs
Collections
Foreclosures
Settlements
Short sales
Repossessions
Public records (bankruptcies)
Read more about derogatory items and how they affect your credit score in this article.
A bankruptcy on your credit report counts as a major derogatory entry.
The Good News: You Can Dispute Inaccurate Derogatory Information on Your Credit Reports
As a consumer, you have the right to have your credit reports be accurate, as dictated by the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA).
Therefore, if there is information on your credit reports that is wrong, then you have the right to ask for the incorrect information to be either corrected or removed from your credit reports.
In order to challenge inaccurate information on your credit reports, you can file a direct dispute with the party that furnishes your data to the credit bureaus (e.g. a lender, financial services company, debt collector, etc.) or an indirect dispute with the credit reporting agencies (CRAs).
If you choose to go the route of an indirect dispute, you contact the CRAs about the problematic information and they then investigate the dispute with the company that is furnishing the data.
You can use either type of dispute to ask for the inaccurate derogatory information on your credit report to be corrected or deleted altogether.
The Bad News: You Do Not Have the Right to Have Accurate Negative Information Removed From Your Credit Reports
According to the FCRA, accurate and verifiable negative information can remain on your credit reports for up to seven years.
Unfortunately, that means if the derogatory information on your credit reports is accurate and verifiable, then the CRAs are under no obligation to remove it before the 7-year clock runs out.
Derogatory information that is accurate and verifiable can stay on your credit report for up to seven years.
How to Dispute Derogatory Entries on Your Credit Reports
It is free to dispute inaccurate information on your credit reports, and you can do this process yourself. Another option is to hire a reputable credit repair company to do this work on your behalf.
If you choose to complete the dispute process yourself, you can do this in a few different ways:
Go to the CRAs’ websites and file your dispute online
Equifax.com
TransUnion.com
Experian.com
Mail your dispute through the postal services
Contact the CRAs over the phone
Dispute the information directly with the furnishing party
You can submit your disputes online on the CRAs’ websites.
Which Dispute Method is Most Effective?
While there is not necessarily a “best” way to file a dispute, often, plaintiff’s lawyers advise consumers to file their disputes with the credit bureaus because this method may leave you in a better positioned to take legal action if the credit bureaus fail to remove the incorrect information.
The Benefits of Disputing Directly With the Furnishing Party
When you file a direct dispute with the company that is furnishing the inaccurate information to the credit bureaus, you are addressing the information at its source. For this reason, the data furnisher has an obligation to correct the error with all of the CRAs they report to.
If a mistake is showing up on more than one of your credit reports, the direct dispute strategy can save you some time since you are only filing one dispute to have the information corrected on each of your credit reports where it is applicable.
Working With a Credit Repair Company to Remove Derogatory Information
Although the consumer credit dispute process is free to use, some consumers may choose to work with a credit repair company to accomplish their goals.
In this case, the credit repair company goes through the dispute process on your behalf.
While a credit repair organization cannot charge you in advance of providing a service as per the Credit Repair Organizations Act (CROA), if they successfully get the information corrected or removed, they can then charge you for this service that has been fully performed.
How Do You Know if You Need to Dispute Incorrect Information on Your Credit Reports?
To find out if there are errors on your credit reports, you need to get copies of your own reports.
Typically, you can do this for free once every 12 months with each of the three credit bureaus. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the CRAs have made it easier to check your credit more often by making it free to check your credit reports every week until April 20, 2022.
To order your free credit reports, go to annualcreditreport.com, which is the only website that is federally authorized to provide your free credit reports, and request them there.
How Long Does the Dispute Resolution Process Take?
The credit bureaus are technically allowed to take 30 days to complete their dispute investigation process, but this rule is decades old. These days, with the technology we have now, it is more likely that your dispute will be resolved in only 10-14 days.
Consumer disputes are usually resolved within two weeks.
We hope this article has been informative for those wondering about how to get derogatory information removed from your credit reports! To learn more about how to use credit report disputes effectively, check out our article on How to Fix the Most Common Credit Report Errors.
Want to see the video version of this article, featuring credit expert John Ulzheimer? Watch it below and then subscribe to our channel on YouTube to see more helpful videos about the credit system!
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