A lot of good things are happening with the Michigan economy right now. Jobs are opening up, real estate is thriving, and a lot of Michiganders are finally getting ahead financially. However, having bad credit can make it difficult to fully take part in this economic revival. If you’re a Michigan consumer with delinquent accounts on your credit reports, you may be looking for the fastest way to fix your credit. There are ways to get these delinquent accounts off your credit reports, but a lot will depend on the ages of the accounts and whether or not they’ve been reporting correctly to the credit bureaus.
How to Tell Whether Delinquent Accounts should Come off your Credit Reports
In a perfect world, you would be able to make delinquent accounts disappear from your credit reports at will. Poof! They’re gone! Heck, in a perfect world, they would never be there in the first place. Alas, though, the world isn’t perfect and neither is your credit. Plenty of Michiganders are struggling with imperfect credit, but even the lowest credit scores can be revived.
The very first thing you should do to jumpstart your credit repair efforts is check your credit reports. Delinquent accounts have expiration dates, and, in Michigan, most of them are supposed to fall off your credit reports after seven years have passed since the date of your first delinquency. Discharged Chapter 7 bankruptcy filings should be reported for ten years after the filing date.
Just remember that the credit bureaus are managed by human beings, and mistakes can happen. Sometimes credit report items that have expired are allowed to hang around long after they should have been removed. So it’s up to you to check your credit reports and report delinquent accounts that are too old to be reported.
How can you tell whether or not a negative item on one of your credit reports has expired? For credit card accounts and installment loans, you’ll need to know the date of your first delinquency and count forward seven years. Again, discharged bankruptcies can linger for ten years after their filing dates, and civil judgments can be reported for seven to ten years past their filing dates.
Delinquent accounts that actually belong to you cannot legally be removed until their clocks have run out. However, if you see delinquent accounts on your credit reports that you don’t recognize, you should report these items to the credit bureaus as errors. Debt that has legitimately expired should also be removed. If you see that delinquent accounts have been re-aged every time they’ve been purchased by a new debt collector, this is NOT acceptable. The expiration clock cannot be turned back by a debt collector unless you make a payment.
How Michiganders can Request their Credit Reports and get Credit Report Errors Removed
Thanks to a federal statute known as the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act (FACTA), you’re entitled to one free copy of your credit report from each of the major credit bureaus every 12 months. It’s easy to get credit reports from TransUnion, Experian, and Equifax if you visit www.annualcreditreport.com, the only federally authorized site for free credit reports.
For Michigan consumers who check their credit reports and find that there are errors bringing down their credit scores, help is available. You can get a FREE credit repair lawyer to take you through the entire credit report error disputing process.
The Free and Legal way to Get Better Credit
Don’t let expired debt and other errors on your credit reports bring your credit score down. At Credit Repair Lawyers of America, we’ve been cleaning up credit reports for consumers since 2008 for free. How do we do it? All of our fees come from the defendants in cases that are settled. This is why our clients pay nothing for the work we do.
Let’s start the conversation about what we can do for your credit. Set up your free consultation today by calling Attorney Gary Nitzkin at (248) 353-2882 or contact us on our contact page.
