@Anonymous wrote:Hey everybody! Long time lurker here. I started frequenting the forums early last year as I started my credit rebuilding journey. I just want to take a moment and express how thankful I am to have come across this community. It has been a huge help to me. Thanks to numerious PFDs, goodwill letters and just straight up paying off the collections in full, I've been able to bump my scores across all 3 bureaus. I went from a range of low-mid 500s to the 640s (with my highest being Experian at 645 as of today). I understand that I am at the mercy of time now until I wait for all the late payments and one paid collections to drop off. All of this happened in 2016 so I have quite some time to go still. Similations show that if I pay down all my ultilaztion on my credit cards, I will still be a few points short of hittng the "good credit" range on the FICO 8, which is my current goal (aside from getting a Chase CSP). With that said, I have one baddie left to take care of before I start to look for a house hopefully sometime late next year. I've tried searching but the answers have been mixed so with my first ever post, I hope to find some guidance on how to proceed.
I had a Wells Fargo credit card back in 2016 that I failed to make payments on and eventually got charged-off. The account is still with them, they have not sold it off and it is still reporting as of today as CLOSED & Charged-off. Balance is $7200 on a credit line of $6800. However, when I check my Utilization on Experian, Credit Karma, and any of the credit tracking features on my CCs, it does not account for this amount. The availble credit, credit usage and limits only take into account my open revolving accounts (which all all current and in good standing). Question is:
1. If it's not currently factoring into my utilization, will paying it off now have any effect on my credit score? Is it secretly factoring in and my credit report is just not showing it? Its factured in on FICO. CK is Vantage. Whole different scoring system.
2. If I do a payment plan to pay it off slowly, will they re-open the account, thus affecting my utilization? If paying it off slowly it will show the balance coming down and WF wont reopen a CO.
3. Does anyone have experience negotiating a settle for less with WF? Is this something a bank would offer? I've negotiated settle for less and PFD with collection agencies before but all research shows that WF will not do a PFD. If not, settle for less would be my goal.
I just want to know what to expect before I contact them and try to arrange a payment plan.
You'll want to settle. This way it will have to show a $0 balance and it will help your scores a tad but the CO status will still ding you. And the CO update each month will stop. Call and ask before it goes to collections and another ding against you and get r done.
I would call them and make an offer of settlement, 50% is a good place to start, Fico looks at the reporting date to make its calcs so yes its keeping your score depressed by updating monthly as it looks new every month even though it happened years ago.
