A judgement on an LLC on my personal Credit Report?

[Anonymous]

I had a small claims judgement against an LLC I own last year show up on a recent persona credit report from Equifax.  

I'm going to have the judgement paid off this week, but I understand the black mark remains for up to 7 years.  

I'm looking into various ways to have this removed, but I was always under the impression that an LLC protected the individual from stuff like this.  

Any advice / suggestions for how to get Experian to remove this mark from my record?

[llecs]

Welcome to the forums!

It depends on the action or event that led to being sued. Per credit, if this was a biz CC, you can get sued for your LLC's debts, especially if you provided a personal guarantee at app time (viturally all biz CCs now require a PG). If this was for an event like an auto accident, for example, the suit could include you if you were driving. It all depends on what the suit is for. Plus, you'd have to personally defend it at that time of the lawsuit in court if you were listed as the defendent.

With regards to removing it, you could ask the plaintiff's attorney to ask the court to remove it early once paid. I don't know any details of the process, but it seems like there are ome success stories in here.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the quick response!

I should have clarified.  The judgement on my personal credit report is from a small claims court.  It is not a business cc.  It is listed under the public records section of the credit report.

It was a smaller judgement, around $1800 that was a result of a business disagreement.  The judgement will be paid in full next week.

My chief concern is that this is on my personal credit report when I was under the impression that since the business is operated as an LLC I would be shielded from something like this happening.  I see it already having a negative effect on my score which I want to correct as soon as possible.  Obviously if I thought this would have happened I would have settled this relativley small claim out of court instead of trying to fight it.  

[GregB]

There are many variables here such as the laws of your state, your position in the LLC, and the entity that was sued.

If you were the one defending the suit and with your reference to "if I thought......I would have settled.....", and the use of the word "own", I would assume you were Managing Member or equivalent. That would make it likely that a judgement could find its way onto your personal report.

In my opinion the big problem was not going to court prepared to pay the judgement on the spot.  Once the court records the judgement, it will normally be hard to get it off. Even when the judgement is paid and recorded as paid, it will still stay on your report doing as much damage as if it was unpaid. Paying will help in that lenders may still consider you creditworthy since the judgement was paid. The FICO hit is the real problem. The size of the judgement is just about irrelevant.