Need Help With Negative Credit Mark

[Anonymous]

Currently on my credit report, I have only 2 negative marks. One is on a credit card which went 2 months without payment but I am making regular payments now. The other is what is killing me. It is from an old credit card which was lost and apparently had charges made to it before I canceled it. The balance was only $231.31, but I was never aware that I owed State Farm this money from their credit card. I assume they mailed the billing statement to my old address on the account prior to Hurricane Katrina, but as I said I never knew it existed. In January of 2008 I received a letter from FMS, Inc. that showed the account was delinquent as of SEPTEMBER 2006!!!! I called the company and explained the situation, but because I had no proof that the charges were fraudulent I didn't know what I could do. So, I agreed to just pay off the balance, it's not like it was a lot of money, if they agreed to remove any negative marks off my credit report that resulted from this. They agreed that they would report to the credit bureaus to remove all negative marks that were the result of this matter at the end of the month when they sent out their normal updates. I signed up for MyFico.com because I am planning on purchasing a new car soon and wanted to know where I stood. I realized that the negative marks had not been removed and that my score is 569 as a result!!! I don't know what to do. Will sending a dispute letter to Equifax help? Is there anything else I should do? Please help as this is really stressing me out. Thank you in advance for any help you can provide.

[Anonymous]

Welcome back henry55 -

It is going to be best to deal with the OC (for state farm)

A good solid letter or several calls the supervisors of supervisors

It is pretty standard to only have 60 days to dispute the charges-

So paying it then was the best thing to do-

I would write a good will letter for the 60 late-

You must have a bit more going on than a 60 day late from 06-

What other positive TL's do you have?

Do you have open CC's? Credit lines? Balances?

Message Edited by Timothy on 02-12-2008 07:37 PM

[Anonymous]

Let's see if this helps shine some more light on this. I looked at myFico report again, and it states that my payment history is very bad, my debt ratio is very good ($2,725) on one credit card, my credit length is very bad (3 years), and my amount of new credit is very good. The bad account from State Farm states "charged off account", and "account closed by credit grantor." I don't know what constitutes a positive TL, but I do have 2 credit cards, one with Jared Jewelry and one with Sony, but I never used those two and was approved about a year ago for both. I really believe that the State Farm thing is what is killing me, since nothing else really looks bad. I have that one credit card I am paying off, but my debt is still low, so I don't see how that could be hurting me. If I have to go through State Farm, do you have a sample of a goodwill dispute letter? Will this have any impact since they closed the account and I paid it off through FMS, Inc. I do have my car insurance with State Farm and have never missed a payment on that. Would that help? Thanks for addressing my situation, Timothy. I do appreciate it since I'm a newbie at this.