Need some help

[Anonymous]

Hi! This is my first post on these boards. I wanted to start to clean up my credit. I ran my credit reports. I currently have only 2 accounts reporting (although I had MANY more than that). The accounts that are reporting been closed since 5/03 & 6/05 and they were not positive reports. They took a settlement. The others are not on the credit reports at all. Why would that be?

My questions are:

1. How can I get these two removed since they are not positive? I'd like to remove them since they are not positive and they are the only two currently reporting.

2. I had other credit cards that didn't close until about 5 years ago. Are they wiped clean from my record? Or if I apply for new lines of credit...will the old accounts come back to haunt me? There have been other companies who have "bought" my account and are wanting a settlement/payoff to close the account. But after looking at my report, it doesn't look like I have the accounts anymore.

3. When, with who, and how long should I wait before applying for new lines of credit?

I'm really new to this all. I got credit cards when I was WAY too young and when I kept trying to pay them off, I got married (BAD decision) and divorced. So I was never able to pay anything off. Most of the accounts (the last time I looked at my report) were "charged off".

I've been looking around the boards, but most of the advice is Greek to me. I found the descriptions of what the abbv.'s stand for, but I need a little more "hold my hand" type of advice.

Thank you to anyone who responds!

[Tuscani]

Welcome.. Please read the Scoring 101 thread:

http://ficoforums.myfico.com/fico/board/message?board.id=ficoscoring&thread.id=2654

[Anonymous]

2. I had other credit cards that didn't close until about 5 years ago. Are they wiped clean from my record? Or if I apply for new lines of credit...will the old accounts come back to haunt me? There have been other companies who have "bought" my account and are wanting a settlement/payoff to close the account. But after looking at my report, it doesn't look like I have the accounts anymore.

3. When, with who, and how long should I wait before applying for new lines of credit?

~~~~~~~~~

Thanks for the answer!  I had read that information, but I was more concerned with the above questions (b/c I didn't see an answer there).  Could it be possible that there are hidden records on my report?  Are they waiting for me to apply for something else so they can appear and try to collect the full amount after all of this time?

BTW, I don't have any hard inquiries, just soft inquiries.  And the only one that looked like it wasn't a pre-approved card inquiry was from Capital One. 

How can I find out when the last activity on the accounts were?  My ex husband took alot of my information with him when he left and he refused to give most of it back.

[Tuscani]

Call the CRAs and get the DOFD.