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Hello all-
I am in the process of cleaning up my credit report. I had a bunch of old, paid collections on my report that I wanted to try and get rid of. I also had an old auto loan that had a few 30 and 60 day lates. Finally, I had one or two ATT collections and a PGE collection. All paid off years ago.
I read on myFICO that writing Goodwill Deletion Letters might get rid of some of this stuff. I know lots of people are curious about GWD letters and whether they are worth the time, the postage, etc. I thought I'd give it a try and report back with my own findings.
I wrote 12 letters (unique to each creditor in one way or another) and mailed them a little over two weeks ago. Here are my results thus far-
Out of 12 letters... I've seen activity on 4 accounts. (Career .300 hitters make it into the Baseball Hall of Fame, so I'm feeling pretty good about this stat.)
Of those 4 accounts...
AMEX. $3K+ charge off. DELETED because they no longer had record of my account in their files. Based on the indentifier I provided from my report, the letter states that the account had been purged. The letter goes on to state that they were sending a request to the CRAs requesting that they delete any/all records tied to the indentifier I provided. SWEET.
Portfolio Recovery (collection agency). Responded that they have reported a $0 balance to all three CRAs, but made no mention of having the account deleted. In other words, they did nothing, because I already had a $0 balance.
Dell Financial Services. Responded that I had to contact the CRAs directly. Nothing else.
Chase Auto. (this one is a little troubling). Info reported changed from "Paid In Full" to "Customer Dispute/Paid In Full" or something along those lines. Is this now going to hurt me? This was paid off in full in 2008. I haven't gotten anything in writing, only an alert I get from Equifax when something changes on my report.
So as of right now, looks like I'm batting .250.
Any thoughts? I'll keep everyone posted.
Tom