My husband and I applied for a mortgage with a lender early on in June, everything looked good so we started house shopping. We monitor our credit monthly through this site and towards the beginning of July we got an alert that my husband's scores dropped significantly. A vehicle that we had paid off in May was being reported as a charge off to 2 of the bureaus, Transunion was reporting correctly.
We immediately called the company and tried to get it sorted out quickly. To make things more complicated the company that originally held our car note sold our loan with only 2 payments left. They were collecting payments through May so we went ahead and paid both May and the final June payment to the original creditor. They sent the money to the new creditor. New creditor mailed us our vehicle title. We never even dealt with the new company and thought we were good.
When we called the new guys they agreed that our account looked good, nothing owed or past due, and they would look into why it was reporting negatively and get it fixed. A few weeks later we get an alert from Experian with a score increase, and an accurate credit report. Equifax still showed as a charge off.
After several phone calls and attempts to fix this with the company reporting nothing changed. We disputed with Equifax twice. First dispute nothing changed, we even submitted bank statements showing payment history and our receipt from final payment saying paid on full, and a copy of the title. Second dispute with Equifax was more successful. It is now reporting paid as agreed, zero balance, but under payment history is is showing CO (charge off) in May of this year, (funnily it's showing OK under April), and under Older Derogatory Events it's showing 90 days late on 5/2019. We were never late with this account and paid it off a month early.
My question is, do we dispute again and wait? Or go forward with a loan and hope that the underwriter will be able to see that they are reporting false information? We found a house this past weekend and want to put in an offer, but not sure how this will affect getting an FHA loan since it's so recent. Any advice is welcome. And if this topic is better meant for the credit repair forum I will post there as well.
