Help from anybody would be appreciated.

[Anonymous]

I was browsing around for credit forums and this site kept coming up so I figured I would make an account here and ask for help. I just recently got out of the Air Force. I'm 23 years old. I flew back in the United States from Germany last night. I served for 4 years so the gov't will pay for my school under the 9/11 GI bill and pay me as well monthly. (Yay.) Anyways on to the point...I decided to check my credit score and my score from Transrisk is 527 and Vantagescore was 569. I have 4 closed accounts deliquent on payments and 4 open accounts in collections. My total debt is $1,264. Before I joined the Air Force my grandma urged me to join this school Colorado Tech because one of her clients she did taxes for worked for them. The school is some type of scam school and I took like one class and got out of it. I believe my school loans for that is what's in collections. I should have took care of this stuff a long time ago but I didn't...too busy running through money,etc. I suck with saving money. I just want some advice on how to take of the situation. This stuff is kinda new to me since I never paid much attention to my credit. What should I do about accounts that are closed? How do I go about paying off the open accounts in collecitons? Any help will be appreciated. Thank you.

[bahbahd]

I don't know where you got those scores from but it seems like you have access to one of your reports from somewhere. If you need others, you could try to pull your three l reports from https://www.annualcreditreport.com/  You get one free annual report from Experian, Transunion and Equifax through this website.

What you want to do is determine if the collection accounts (CA) are from revolving credit cards (CC), student loans or other bills that have gone unpaid. For any revolving accounts, you want to see if the original creditor (OC) still reports a balance, aka, you still owe them the money. Otherwise, if they are reporting $0 balance as a charge off (CO), then the debt has been officially sold to the debt collector. (CA) 

For any collection activities on federal student loans (SL), I would look into a rehabilitation program. This would give you the opportunity to get the loans out of collections and once the rehabilitation period is up, the beginning of new positive account tradelines. 

Any other collection accounts, you start with debt validation letters (DV) and then offer to pay in-full/settle for deletion (PFD.)

There is a fair amount of reading you can do around here to help get you on the right path.

[jadeite788]

Sounds like you used creditkarma annualcreditreport sites, their scores be off.  I would suggest you get the Myfico Transunion and Equifax scores to get a more true and accurate score and a clearer picture of your credit report.  get your annual report from experian.    I agree with Bah, do debt validation letters first, but at the same time you need to review all your reports for any inaccuracies.  

[guiness56]

Get free reports from each CRA once every 12 months at annualcreditreport.com.  These are directly from the CRAs and are the most accurate with much more information than 3rd party sites..  Don't get the scores, they are not true FICO.

You can get your TU and EQ from myFICO.