Should I pay a 120 day late account off

[Anonymous]

I have one account on my credit that is now being reported 120 days late, even though I opened it back in 2008.

I tried to call and ask them for a Pay to Delete (They said they do not do pay to deletes) as I want to buy a house and its keeping my score on equifax down around 616. My other scores are closer to 700.

My questions is;

If I pay it off, how soon would my score recover?

Should I even pay if off, or just wait for it to drop at the 7 year mark? First date of dilinquency is reported as 07/2008.

[MarineVietVet]

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@Anonymous wrote:

I have one account on my credit that is now being reported 120 days late, even though I opened it back in 2008.

I tried to call and ask them for a Pay to Delete (They said they do not do pay to deletes) as I want to buy a house and its keeping my score on equifax down around 616. My other scores are closer to 700.

My questions is;

If I pay it off, how soon would my score recover?

Should I even pay if off, or just wait for it to drop at the 7 year mark? First date of dilinquency is reported as 07/2008.

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Hello and welcome to myFICO.

Is this just late payments or is it something worse? Late payments can report for no longer than 7 years from date of occurrence.

Did this ever go to a charge off or collections? If so it can't report any longer than 7.5 years form the DoFD on the OC account that led to the collection or CO.

[Anonymous]

Right now it is just being reported as 120 days late, it is not in Charge off Status

I do not think it is in collections, as I owe the company directly still. 

What I think happened is;

I hired someone to help clean up my credit, they sent out some disputes for me, got a lot of things removed. Once this account received the disputes they started to report me late. It might of been charged off before that, but I do not know how I could get a credit report from 6 months ago to check.

I am willing to pay the balance in full, just do not want to do it if it will take longer for my credit to recover than it would for it to just drop off.

Its very frustrating, as this is the only negative thing left on my credit (Just equifax too) and the company is not willing to work with me to get it removed.

[MarineVietVet]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Right now it is just being reported as 120 days late, it is not in Charge off Status

I do not think it is in collections, as I owe the company directly still. 

What I think happened is;

I hired someone to help clean up my credit, they sent out some disputes for me, got a lot of things removed. Once this account received the disputes they started to report me late. It might of been charged off before that, but I do not know how I could get a credit report from 6 months ago to check.

I am willing to pay the balance in full, just do not want to do it if it will take longer for my credit to recover than it would for it to just drop off.

Its very frustrating, as this is the only negative thing left on my credit (Just equifax too) and the company is not willing to work with me to get it removed.

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Ok thanks for the clarification.

Unfortunately paying off any negative won't help your score in and of itself. Scoring only looks at the negative reporting.

If the date of occurrence was 7/2008 then it will be gone by the end of July this year.

[takeshi74]

Make sure you carefully research before taking action.  The Rebuilding subforum is a resource that you may want to refer to.