@Anonymous wrote:Only the one in the amount of $3,387 is the one that shouldn't be there. We honestly do not rightly owe a debt to that particualr company but I have been unsuccessful in having it removed.
That debt could have been sold to a new company that is trying to collect.
There are very rare occasions that debt are incorrect on your report, especially if you have disputed and they find it to be accurate.
If you are trying to pay as little as possible, then try to settle with them. However it would show on your CR that you have done that.
If you are trying to buy a house and looking for higher credit score then your best bet is to pay the debt and try pay for deletion!
I would stop spending money with credit! Given you have newly late payments and high utilization is not going to be easy cleaning your CR.
Most of us in this site been where you have and some like me much worse situation. It can be fixed, only issue is it takes time that can be very tedious but reward of having good credit is worth it.
Good Luck.
One thing that has worked for us when the debt is inaccurate but the creditor refuses to fix it is to file a complaint with the BBB or the Consumer Protection Bureau. One that I disputed at least 4 - 5 times over the span of 2 years was removed when I filed a BBB complaint because they came back stating they are not legally authorized to collect in the state we live in so they deleted it. I was like well dang, I wish I would have known that months ago because I would have just gone straight to the BBB. The collection agency wouldn't ever verify the information when I asked them for it, but when I would dispute with the credit bureaus it would always come back verified.
I spoke to someone at Experian not too long ago that told me their verification process is basically just 2 computers talking to each other. The bureau submits the dispute and the creditor's computer responds. So in reality Experian is not technically seeing any information from the creditor to prove that the debt is valid. I'm not sure how they get away with that, or if she wasn't actually supposed to tell me that.
My student loans were reporting late at one point, but when I requested a forbearance due to having to relocate after my husband retired from the military all of the late pays went away. I am not sure if that was the policy of the creditor that holds my student loans, or if that is just how all of them work, but it raised my score immensely!
I am sure this isn't the most popular suggestion, but when we first started getting serious about cleaning up our credit we used Lexington Law for a few months. At the time we were trying to work on our credit my husband was deployed, I was going to school and we have 5 kids (who were all much smaller and much more demanding at the time). It was super helpful to have someone else sending out validation letters for me. We stayed with them for about 6 months. I mainly canceled because while we used their service, they were able to remove a lot and I felt like I could tackle the rest on my own without paying for it. You can absolutely do the same thing that they can do, a big difference is there is a lot more work involved when you do it on your own.
We are still working on credit years later because some of the accounts were sold so secondary creditors started popping up and it was almost like starting all over again. I work on them one at a time and just stay relentless. We have been fortunate enough to find a lender who will only pull Ex fico8 for our mortgage. We are 2 points away from their 650 required score. 2 years ago we were well below 600. I probably could have gotten it there sooner but I didn't understand the importance of credit card utilization until a few months ago and how big the impact is on the score.
As soon as our scores started creeping up I added a couple of small credit card accounts through the shopping cart trick (if you don't know what that is, search it on here and google) because I was trying to keep inquiries down. Having those cards opened up our utilization, which helped a lot. New accounts posting to your credit will have a negative impact for a short time as well, but as long as you aren't adding a bunch of useless cards every month for months on end it should recover pretty quickly.
A few months later our scores were up close to 620 and we applied for USAA credit cards. I closed a couple of the smaller store cards that we really weren't ever going to use because I had replaced the open credit with the USAA cards. Every few months I request credit limit increases on cards that I know will not hard pull. Bringing your utilization under 30% will be the first step, then under 10% your next step. I have read on the forums here that having 0 balance on all but one card will optimize score as well, but realistically that is one of the last things at this point with the several negatives going on. Those are hurting your scores way more than the credit card utilization.
Make sure you are paying ALL of your open accounts on time as you are working on removing the bad ones. I researched a lot on this topic on the forums here and I learned about pay for delete and how to go about doing it. Its a lot of information, but search the bar for PFD and a ton of awesome information will come up. Make sure you read up on the proper way to do it, though, or you can make things worse with the date of last activity and possibly giving credit agencies ammunition that they didn't have before.
Sorry this got so long-winded. I am still learning myself, but your story hit home with me. We were in the same boat a few years ago. Now we are just 2 points away from buying our first home (we currently live in the house we are buying)! Just don't give up even when it gets frustrating! 
Thank you so much for you advice! I can't thank you enough! We've become so frustrated in this process because our income is great, our DTI is wonderful...but the credit is the one thing getting in the way of our home. I appreciate you taking the time to share the knowledge that you have with me
We actually spoke to my husbands student loan company today and they said if we started to repay with autopay they will bring it to show current and will remove the late payments from his report. They sent it over to us in writing as well. So I will just have to tacle the charge off next, some way some how.
