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Goodwill Letters Work! Sorta.

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Anonymous
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Goodwill Letters Work! Sorta.

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

 

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1 REPLY 1
dddfresh
Frequent Contributor

Re: Goodwill Letters Work! Sorta.

Hey there. I wrote a goodwill letter to the creator of dell and emailed him. Just today. Did you have any luck with writing to the CRA regarding Dell? Mine is a paid charge off from 5 years ago. Thanks and hope all is well

9/2013: Fico EQ 676, EXP 686, Fico TU 686.
NFCU Flagship Sig. $14k..NFCU CashRwdsSig $14k..NFCU LOC $12.5k..USAA Amex 4k..AMEX Green NPSL..Discover IT $1.5k...BofA Cash Rewards123 $2.5k...Southwest Premier $2k..Chase Freedom $1.5k..CareCredit $3.5k..Cap1-$1.5k..HSBC $300...Lowes $1.5k...WalMart $1.5k...JCP $1k..Chevron $1.1k..Kays/Jerrod - $5k split. around 8% Util. Want to get in the 700's in 2013! Have three old paid charge offs. 15-20inq.. LAST APP 8/29/13
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