Question regarding a paid Collection

[Anonymous]

I recently paid of an old Credit Card balance from First Premier bank through a Collection Agency. However, upon looking at my Credit Report, it does not show the Collection Agency on there, it only shows First Premier. Will this still be updated as paid?

[Autumnslight]

Does it show a balance, late payments, or charge-off? It should be updated to a zero balance. Any lates would remain, and if it was a charge-off, that would remain but show paid. The fact that the collection account is gone is great though, otherwise you'd have had two paid, but still negative, accounts. At least now there'll only be one, which you can send goodwill letters for.

[Anonymous]

Yes it does still show a blance, however I just paid it off 3 days ago. I have 4 ugly's on my account which are all Paid for. 1 is set to go off my reprt in Dec 2012, 2 in April of 2013 and this credit card should be off in Dec 2013. My current scores are EX-632 EQ-632 and TU-602. Hoping when all of these start dropping my scores will go up. I'm new to trying to finally repair my credit and figured the best way was to start paying off the bills I knew I owed but dodged for so many years. So as of right now, all my ugly's are paid although still negative, I have 100% credit available and 10 accounts in good standing with an average age of 10 years or more. Any suggestions to help bump up my score, would be greatly appreciated!!!

[Anonymous]

Oh and here is another question I hope you can answer. 2 of my uglys are from a Collection Agency. However the name of the company I paid the debt too and the one that is listed on my Credit Report as different companies? The original debt was to Cash Net USA, showing on my Credit Report is Express Recovery and the company I paid was Galaxy Solutions.

[Autumnslight]

It should update to paid when they report to the credit agencies next. Could be a couple days, or a couple weeks, but should be less than a month. Your next step would be to send goodwill letters to all of the negative accounts, basically asking them to give you a second chance and remove the negative information.

A world of caution, they could just remove the whole account entirely, so you have to weigh the risk. If it's one of your oldest accounts, and the bad info is from a long time ago, it might not be worth it. For example, I would leave 30 or 60 day lates that are more than two years old alone. I would definitely go after any charge-offs or 90 days lates though.

For the collection agencies, you can try disputing them with the credit reporting agencies directly. If it's something very old and it's been sold a few times, the collection agency might not be able to verify them, and they'd have to be deleted. I've had better luck with this by sending letters to the credit reporting agencies, rather than disputing online. If it doesn't work, and the collection agency can verify it, then you can start sending them goodwill letters too.

My tip for goodwill letters: send them monthly. Make the letters sob stories. Or make them funny. Do something to make them stand out. Make them want to delete the account because they feel compassion for you, or because you made them laugh, or because you're so annoying that they just want to make you go away. As long as they don't have any other legitimate bad stuff they haven't already reported, then you've got nothing to lose. Good luck!