FICO Transcrepancy - Transunion much lower, how to fix?

[Anonymous]

I'm hoping someone here can point me in the right direction.  I'm in the process of trying to clean my reports and get my scores updated.  My EQ and EX reports are ok and my scores are working their way up.  Experian is 601 and Equifax is around 689.  My Transunion score is in the tank though at around 567.  The only difference is that I have a single collections account reporting which is bogus.  It was a Verizon account paid in a BK that was d/c 4/4/17.  It however is still being marked as an open collections account.  I just recently sent another letter trying to get it removed.  The first letter we sent a couple of months ago to get it removed was unsuccessful.  This however is the only reason I can come up with as to why my TU score is so much lower. 

That being said, my Experian is also much lower than my Equifax and there's no collections account reporting on it.

Here's what reported on all 3 CRA's so far:

BKR Discharged 4/4/17

Late payments prior to BKR are all on accounts that were included in BKR and are now showing as paid through the BKR

OpenSky Credit - $300 limit, utilization kept at or under 30%

Judgment - a single medical judgement currently standing at $1000 and is being paid as agreed with the attorney

Not reporting yet:

Capital One QS1 Card - $3k limit just opened

PenFed Promise - $1k limit just opened

Capital One QS1 - $3k I'm an authorized user on only (my husband's account)

Other than the letter and attempting to get that removed from my TU report, what else can I do at the moment other than lower utilization and on time payments?  Seeing my TU & EX scores so much lower than my EQ is kind of annoying. 

Am I better off keeping the judgment on there and paying every month or should I use one or two of the of the credit cards to pay it off and then just pay off the card wtihin a month or two just so I can get it off my CR?  The interest on my Cap One is 25% and my PenFed is 15%

Any help/advice you can give to try and get these scores up there with my EQ would be fantastic.  I'm trying to rebuild after BKR and have made it a decent ways so far but I'm kind of stuck at the moment as to what to do next.  Thanks!!

[Revelate]

I'd research as to how I could get the judgement off completely rather than just paid; if you can satisfy it and get it vacated, that works for example.

My SWAG from your read, if you disputed the collection they may have re-reported which can re-age things... which is stupid and a crappy implementation, but it happens.  Check the TU base report see when they expect it to fall off and then walk the DOFD back from there as my guess is it wasn't reported.  If the DOFD isn't accurate, dispute that as such would be my strategy, historically CA's would just tack a collection on, and the bureaus would just assume a default DOFD of "today" if it wasn't explicitly listed when filed... that ain't right though, figure out what the DOFD would be (when you first missed a payment on the underlying obligation that went to collection) and if it ain't right on the bureau, make them get it right.

Also just general FICO 8 prettiness, if you don't have any open installment lines, pull the share secured loan trick:

Method:
http://ficoforums.myfico.com/t5/Understanding-FICO-Scoring/Adding-an-installment-loan-the-Share-Secu...

That's nothing but goodness from a modern algorithm perspective.

You're stuck on the BK, nothing doing there, but for the rest if you can get cleaned up that will help your rebuild but honestly getting 3 credit cards to build positive history on is *exactly* what you should be doing imo: biggest credit mistake I see people make is getting some nasty event (BK) and then swearing off credit cards and similar: negatives suck, but lack of postive history isn't a good thing either.

[Anonymous]

Well the goodwill letter worked because according to my reports, the collections account is gone!  Still not great and still much lower than my EQ but my TU is now at 588 so it jumped considerably!  Still need to work on getting it up there, but this is a start!

Any other suggestions?  Would I be better off paying the judgment with a credit card and then paying off the card or just paying off the judgment as agreed?  I'll try and see if they'll remove from CR of course either way.

[Revelate]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Well the goodwill letter worked because according to my reports, the collections account is gone!  Still not great and still much lower than my EQ but my TU is now at 588 so it jumped considerably!  Still need to work on getting it up there, but this is a start!

Any other suggestions?  Would I be better off paying the judgment with a credit card and then paying off the card or just paying off the judgment as agreed?  I'll try and see if they'll remove from CR of course either way.

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Shouldn't make a difference, I would just fufill the terms you agreed to rather than doing anything fancy with the credit card... might count as a cash advance for example which isn't what you want in your situation.