"Serious Delinquency" listed, but not showing up

[Anonymous]

Hi, I'm new to looking at these reports, and am a bit mystified by something I'm seeing. My credit score was around 710-730 for the last year or so, and suddenly this month it dropped to 599. I'm a bit shocked, to say the least! When I look at the "Understanding Your FICO Score" section of my report, it lists "Serious Delinquency", "Past Due Balances" and "Recent Missed Payment". The thing is, I definitely don't have any past due balances, missed payments, or delinquencies. What I have noticed is that the Past Due amount listed is the amount of my student loans. I called my provider, and they said they hadn't reported any late payments or delinquencies. One thing, though, is that I am making reduced payments to them, since I am living abroad much of the time. Would these reduced payments be triggering my report to show me as delinquent? If so, is there any way to fix this? Thank you all so much for your help.

[Anonymous]

I would pull a copy of your CR and see how the loan is actually reporting to the CRAs.

[Anonymous]

Sorry, I don't think I understand how exactly to go about pulling a copy of my CR. When I look at the CR through myFICO, on my Credit at a Glance page it lists Late Payments as 0, and has 0 next to Collections as well. If I look at the list of my Accounts, next to my two student loan accounts there are flags, and clicking on them it brings me to a page where it says times paid late 0 for all the date ranges. Under description it says, "Arrangement made with credit grantor to make partial payments." Nonetheless, everywhere I can see it is showing 0s next to anything that would seem to support the MyFICO listing of "Serious Delinquency," "Past Due Balances," and "Recent Missed Payments." I have no past due balances, no serious delinquencies, and no recent missed payments. If there is somewhere else I can look to get to the bottom of this, I would very much appreciate hand-holding on how to get there - as I say, I am completely new to this. Thank you so much! I really am hoping to get this resolved.

[Anonymous]

Kalisti, I IMed one of the admins for the site to direct his attention to this question. Hopefully we'll get an answer for you soon.

[haulingthescoreup]

I'm not the pm'd mod , but I did want to ask if your loans were with Sallie Mae. They had an astonishing meltdown a month ago when they reported loans being paid back on special schedules as being late. This only happened on EQ.

They were supposed to have fixed it by now, but you might want to read this thread. It was very much in real-time, so the drama got pretty impressive at times, but it got the job done:

new error in Sallie Mae reporting

This should get you occupied until the cavalry rides in. Hope you get untangled soon!


edit to add: to pull the full copy of your credit report, go to
https://www.annualcreditreport.com/cra/index.jsp. Choose Select State (they have some overseas options. When it asks which report you want, click the one that is showing errors on your FICO report. (I'm guessing that you have Equifax.)

If you've already gotten your freebie within the past year, you'll have to pay $9-10.

Message Edited by haulingthescoreup on 06-28-2008 06:04 PM

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the quick reply. The lender is VSAC, and I can't find anything online about them having problems.

I signed up for Equifax and got my CR from them. It lists 0 Negative Accounts, 0 Public Records, and 0 Collections. So now I am really confused! There's only one Inquiry on my account, for a loan a bit over a year ago. And my score for the last six months has been: 729 / 702 / 721 / 697 / 700 / 598, so this is a rather drastic drop all at once.

Again, thank you all so much for your help in getting to the bottom of this!

[Anonymous]

Does anyone have any further ideas on this? I'm totally stumped, and VSAC (my lender) has no idea why it would be happening. Should I contact the credit agency directly? Thanks!

[haulingthescoreup]

Have you pulled your full report directly from the CRA? Scores are derived directly from what's on each report, so if something funky is going on there, it's reflected in scores.

[Anonymous]

Hi! Thanks for the reply. I did get my CR direct from Equifax, and it showed 0 Negatives, which leaves me even more stumped than before.