topic Re: Removing entire TL vs. late payments? in General Credit Topics

Removing entire TL vs. late payments?

Anonymous — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 01:30:47 GMT

So I just started this credit repair journey...thanks to reading all of your wonderful posts

Here's my issue...I have 5 old store accounts (old navy, bestbuy, chase, victoria secret, and macys) all about 6 year old accounts that have all been paid in full for 4 or more years. However, they all have 1-2 late 30days, or 60 days on them.

With everyones help I have contacted all of them with goodwill letters and today contacted Chase and they said they would remove the entire account as if it never existed, but could not take the negatives since they were reported accurate. So I took the choice to remove it completely.

But now I am nervous because I have read alot about how closing accounts and removing them completely can damage the credit score more? Should I leave the negatives...or remove the accounts completely?

Thank you!

Re: Removing entire TL vs. late payments?

AndySoCal — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 02:11:59 GMT

Are the accounts you are referring to closed ? Keep in mind the impact of late payment lessens as time passes on your FICO score.

Re: Removing entire TL vs. late payments?

Anonymous — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 02:14:33 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:
So I just started this credit repair journey...thanks to reading all of your wonderful posts

Here's my issue...I have 5 old store accounts (old navy, bestbuy, chase, victoria secret, and macys) all about 6 year old accounts that have all been paid in full for 4 or more years. However, they all have 1-2 late 30days, or 60 days on them.

With everyones help I have contacted all of them with goodwill letters and today contacted Chase and they said they would remove the entire account as if it never existed, but could not take the negatives since they were reported accurate. So I took the choice to remove it completely.

But now I am nervous because I have read alot about how closing accounts and removing them completely can damage the credit score more? Should I leave the negatives...or remove the accounts completely?

Thank you!

If the accounts that you had removed completely were among your oldest accounts you can expect your score to go down quite a bit due to the hit your AAoA (and utilization percentage) will take. If an account is in good standing but has a few lates on it, it's always better to remove the lates than to delete the entire TL. If the OC won't remove the lates, you have to take AAoA and the age of the lates into consideration.

Re: Removing entire TL vs. late payments?

Anonymous — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 02:50:18 GMT

The chase one i had removed was late about 2 years ago....it was a closed account because it was inactive for these past 2 years, meaning i havent used the card since i paid it off. But it had the most lates (5 -30days).

So if they are older and have 1 late on them it is probably better to keep them open and keep the one late payment then remove the entire account?

This making me nervous that i sent all of these goodwill and then they may remove all of the accounts and end up hurting me :/

Re: Removing entire TL vs. late payments?

Anonymous — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 03:10:36 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:
The chase one i had removed was late about 2 years ago....it was a closed account because it was inactive for these past 2 years, meaning i havent used the card since i paid it off. But it had the most lates (5 -30days).

So if they are older and have 1 late on them it is probably better to keep them open and keep the one late payment then remove the entire account?

This making me nervous that i sent all of these goodwill and then they may remove all of the accounts and end up hurting me :/

Yes, old accounts help your score a lot, while old lates aren't that bad. Maybe you can talk to them before they delete the accounts.

Re: Removing entire TL vs. late payments?

Anonymous — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 06:35:38 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:
@Anonymous wrote:
The chase one i had removed was late about 2 years ago....it was a closed account because it was inactive for these past 2 years, meaning i havent used the card since i paid it off. But it had the most lates (5 -30days).

So if they are older and have 1 late on them it is probably better to keep them open and keep the one late payment then remove the entire account?

This making me nervous that i sent all of these goodwill and then they may remove all of the accounts and end up hurting me :/
Yes, old accounts help your score a lot, while old lates aren't that bad. Maybe you can talk to them before they delete the accounts.

I had an Chase CC account opened in1994 with 30/60/90 lates on it from 2006 and closed that same year. After much thinking, I made the CEO of Chase move and they deleted the entire tradeline as they seem to have been doing recently for others here.. My concern about losing all that AAofA was ill advised however, my 3 scores went up like an average of 55 points EACH after deletion. The scores are FAKO's, since I have one more thing to do to my reports before I bother to get (pay for) my real FICO scores, TU and EQ respectively. After reading up more on this subject, I am now convinced that the 60 and 90 day lates were poison on my CR's despite the age of 5+ years. So it seems to me that if you have 60's and especially if you have 90's on your CR's, you should try to get them off somehow. I understand the losing the age of the accounts , maybe for 30's only. But anything higher, at least for me seems like a no brainer. Or in my case try not to get them in the first place!!!

Re: Removing entire TL vs. late payments?

Booner72 — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 20:54:48 GMT

You know, I'd have to think that having the lates gone would be better for your score than an long-standing tradeline w/ negatives. Think about it - people with only a year of credit with no derogs have much better scores than people (like me) where my oldest account is 12 years old, but I'm tapped out right now at 628 and I don't think I can get much higher bc of all the crap on my reports I can't get rid of.

I also just added THREE new accounts (Walmart/CU Visa/CU OD Line of credit) - my AAoA went from 6 years to 4 years, and my score only moved down seven points.

I think that clean credit far outweighs length of credit. Wait and see what happens to your score and let us know. Then you can decide whether to get rid of the others if the option arises for you. Good Luck!!

Re: Removing entire TL vs. late payments?

Anonymous — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 21:07:42 GMT

@Booner72 wrote:
You know, I'd have to think that having the lates gone would be better for your score than an long-standing tradeline w/ negatives. Think about it - people with only a year of credit with no derogs have much better scores than people (like me) where my oldest account is 12 years old, but I'm tapped out right now at 628 and I don't think I can get much higher bc of all the crap on my reports I can't get rid of.

I also just added THREE new accounts (Walmart/CU Visa/CU OD Line of credit) - my AAoA went from 6 years to 4 years, and my score only moved down seven points.

I think that clean credit far outweighs length of credit. Wait and see what happens to your score and let us know. Then you can decide whether to get rid of the others if the option arises for you. Good Luck!!

Definitely!!!

Re: Removing entire TL vs. late payments?

Anonymous — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 21:24:08 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:
@Anonymous wrote:
@Anonymous wrote:
The chase one i had removed was late about 2 years ago....it was a closed account because it was inactive for these past 2 years, meaning i havent used the card since i paid it off. But it had the most lates (5 -30days).

So if they are older and have 1 late on them it is probably better to keep them open and keep the one late payment then remove the entire account?

This making me nervous that i sent all of these goodwill and then they may remove all of the accounts and end up hurting me :/
Yes, old accounts help your score a lot, while old lates aren't that bad. Maybe you can talk to them before they delete the accounts.
I had an Chase CC account opened in1994 with 30/60/90 lates on it from 2006 and closed that same year. After much thinking, I made the CEO of Chase move and they deleted the entire tradeline as they seem to have been doing recently for others here.. My concern about losing all that AAofA was ill advised however, my 3 scores went up like an average of 55 points EACH after deletion. The scores are FAKO's, since I have one more thing to do to my reports before I bother to get (pay for) my real FICO scores, TU and EQ respectively. After reading up more on this subject, I am now convinced that the 60 and 90 day lates were poison on my CR's despite the age of 5+ years. So it seems to me that if you have 60's and especially if you have 90's on your CR's, you should try to get them off somehow. I understand the losing the age of the accounts , maybe for 30's only. But anything higher, at least for me seems like a no brainer. Or in my case try not to get them in the first place!!!

Was that 1994 account one of your oldest accounts? What was your AAoA before and after you had it removed?

Re: Removing entire TL vs. late payments?

Anonymous — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 21:28:18 GMT

Say you have 2 TL. One is 10 years old, the other is 6 months old. If you have three 9 year old lates on that 10 year old account, it's better to keep them than to delete that TL. Why would you want to erase 10 years of credit history, 9 years of GOOD history just to remove some lates? Obviously it's different if you've got 3 10 year old accounts and one has three lates on it. Removing one of the accounts doesn't hurt your AAoA at all and it removes the lates.

It's not accurate to say lates affect your score more than AAoA based solely on your own experiences because your overall history is probably nothing like the OP.

Re: Removing entire TL vs. late payments?

Anonymous — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 00:12:06 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:
Say you have 2 TL. One is 10 years old, the other is 6 months old. If you have three 9 year old lates on that 10 year old account, it's better to keep them than to delete that TL. Why would you want to erase 10 years of credit history, 9 years of GOOD history just to remove some lates? Obviously it's different if you've got 3 10 year old accounts and one has three lates on it. Removing one of the accounts doesn't hurt your AAoA at all and it removes the lates.

It's not accurate to say lates affect your score more than AAoA based solely on your own experiences because your overall history is probably nothing like the OP.

It is not me saying that lates, ie payment history, affect your scores more than AAoA. I do not base what I have said above and then what you have apparently misread solely on my own experiences. Payment history comprises 35% of your score, length of credit history comprises 15% of your score, these are facts.

What I did say was if you have 90 day lates or maybe 60 day lates you should try to get them off. Clearly, since the OP said he had lates on ALL HIS TL's, no one is/was advocating deleting/removing all his TL's...

I have no idea what a person would do with a 10 year old TL with three 9 year old lates on it since lates do not affect your CR's after seven years. So I do not know why a person would want to remove a 10 year old TL if the lates on it no longer were a negative factor.

Also, just talking about "lates" in a general way does no one any good. Saying "old lates aren't that bad" does not give the full picture. What KIND (30/60/90/120???) of lates seems to matter greatly. Like I stated, in my case the 60 late and the 90 late were poison for my FAKO scores. I lost like 3 years total of AAoA by getting a 17 year old TL deleted but my scores went up like 50 points. No one ever claimed that my history is similar to the OP's. The only statement I made that wasn't about my experience solely was that 60 and 90 day lates are very bad for your scores.

Lastly, I specifically related my Chase GW story on this thread because the OP had already done a similar Chase GW. Chase is virtually the only OC that if and when they decide to give GW, they always insist on deleting the entire TL and not just removing the lates contained in that TL. In all the GW success stories contained in posts I have read here, it seemed to me that the vast majority of the very small minority of GW's given by other OC's or even CA's DO NOT delete the entire TL and merely remove the lates. Perhaps the OP, because of his experience with Chase, now thinks that GW's= account deletion or removal, it does not based again on many threads I have read here. I definitely should have said that in my earlier response because it is an important difference to be made....... I completely understand the idea of NOT removing positive TL's, if I could/would have waited 2 more years my Chase would have been clean and been giving me 19 years of age. But i need to clean up my act sooner that August 2013 so I tried and suceeded in getting rid of that TL now.

All I am saying specifically is that 60 and 90 day lates seemed to be very bad on my CR's and might be very bad on other people's CR's but like they say: YMMV

Oh, and below is where I got my "not accurate" information about lates affecting your scores more than AAoA...

What’s in your FICO® score

FICO Scores are calculated from a lot of different credit data in your credit report. This data can be grouped into five categories as outlined below. The percentages in the chart reflect how important each of the categories is in determining your FICO score.

These percentages are based on the importance of the five categories for the general population. For particular groups - for example, people who have not been using credit long - the importance of these categories may be somewhat different.

Payment History

Account payment information on specific types of accounts (credit cards, retail accounts, installment loans, finance company accounts, mortgage, etc.)
Presence of adverse public records (bankruptcy, judgements, suits, liens, wage attachments, etc.), collection items, and/or delinquency (past due items)
Severity of delinquency (how long past due)
Amount past due on delinquent accounts or collection items
Time since (recency of) past due items (delinquency), adverse public records (if any), or collection items (if any)
Number of past due items on file
Number of accounts paid as agreed

Amounts Owed

Amount owing on accounts
Amount owing on specific types of accounts
Lack of a specific type of balance, in some cases
Number of accounts with balances
Proportion of credit lines used (proportion of balances to total credit limits on certain types of revolving accounts)
Proportion of installment loan amounts still owing (proportion of balance to original loan amount on certain types of installment loans)

Length of Credit History

Time since accounts opened
Time since accounts opened, by specific type of account
Time since account activity

New Credit

Number of recently opened accounts, and proportion of accounts that are recently opened, by type of account
Number of recent credit inquiries
Time since recent account opening(s), by type of account
Time since credit inquiry(s)
Re-establishment of positive credit history following past payment problems

Types of Credit Used

Number of (presence, prevalence, and recent information on) various types of accounts (credit cards, retail accounts, installment loans, mortgage, consumer finance accounts, etc.)

Please note that:

A FICO score takes into consideration all these categories of information, not just one or two.
No one piece of information or factor alone will determine your score.
The importance of any factor depends on the overall information in your credit report.
For some people, a given factor may be more important than for someone else with a different credit history. In addition, as the information in your credit report changes, so does the importance of any factor in determining your FICO score. Thus, it's impossible to say exactly how important any single factor is in determining your score - even the levels of importance shown here are for the general population, and will be different for different credit profiles. What's important is the mix of information, which varies from person to person, and for any one person over time.
Your FICO score only looks at information in your credit report.
However, lenders look at many things when making a credit decision including your income, how long you have worked at your present job and the kind of credit you are requesting.
Your score considers both positive and negative information in your credit report.
Late payments will lower your score, but establishing or re-establishing a good track record of making payments on time will raise your FICO credit score.

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Re: Removing entire TL vs. late payments?

AndySoCal — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 01:17:11 GMT

First see what the GW letters results are. How old are the lates on the other accounts? IE when did the lates happen.

Re: Removing entire TL vs. late payments?

Anonymous — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 02:24:33 GMT

SO the results are in....and my Experan went up 10 points after removing the chase account. woo hoo Ill take it! Now I am just working on macys, old navy, and victoria secret 60 day lates If anyone has a good contact for these let me know!

Also another question, I have alot of student loans still in grace period do those count toward my good credit history yet? I know they will as soon as I start repaying...but wondering if they are helping now because they are in good standing.

Thanks everyone!

Re: Removing entire TL vs. late payments?

Anonymous — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 03:33:17 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:
SO the results are in....and my Experan went up 10 points after removing the chase account. woo hoo Ill take it! Now I am just working on macys, old navy, and victoria secret 60 day lates If anyone has a good contact for these let me know!

Also another question, I have alot of student loans still in grace period do those count toward my good credit history yet? I know they will as soon as I start repaying...but wondering if they are helping now because they are in good standing.

Thanks everyone!

Good for you!!! Remember Chase is the major hard rock about ONLY deleting entire TL's and not just removing the lates from your CR's... Your goal is to GW (sweettalk) as many of the rest as you can off and retain the TL if possible. Fallback positions are "can they at least change a 60 into a 30" or can they lose one of the lates if you have more than one on a TL...

I have been working in a big way on getting my GF's Macy's baddie off her CR's... No success yet but... A lot of people get some success on the phone by just calling and calling the CRS's and asking. The letter writers have had some success.

For every TL you want to try to get off your reports, just Google the company name and GW success, read ALL you can and buy a bunch of stamps. All they can say is no thanks.