School tuition - Collection

[Anonymous]

My Score dropped form 719 to 625  ( it is even worse on my 3 bureau report provided by my bank credit monitoring service , 560), the reason was a +180 days delinquent school account of 1975 balance, (not a loan, just regular tuition that I was planning to pay after I finish the course).

Now that I paid off this account, and knowing it wasn't a loan and was just a delinquent bill, how long should I expect to fix my credit score?

[SCF]

Unless the school deletes the collection account, you won't see much improvement immediately.  Unfortunately, FICO scores unpaid and paid collections about the same, so in the case of a collection, just paying the debt doesn't have a large impact.

I would head over to the Rebuilding Your Credit forums and read what you find there about collections and getting them removed.

[Anonymous]

Hi, Thanks for the reply, I called the School and they said it wasn't sent to a collection agency, but it was thier billing facility, and that it was only reported as a late payment, I checked back on my bank provided credit monitoring serviuces and all three agencies report no collection accounts, now that I apid the bill in full, what should I expect?, is that any different from the previous assumption where I thought it was a cxollection account on my report?

[SCF]

It's the same deal really.  Unless the school removes the late payment notation, it will continue to negatively impact your credit.  Late payments are removed after 7 years, but they have less of an impact each year along the way.  If you check out the other forums here, you can get a sense of how long and to what extent a late payment impacts your score.