Remove Late Payments
Late payments on your credit report are not all weighed the same. In fact a late payment of 30 days or 60 days will not damage your credit score badly.
However a 90 day late payment is a very severe mark and will do a lot of damage to your credit score. You have two options to delete any late payment marks on your credit report.
- You can contact the lender and ask them to remove the mark
This can be done over the phone or through the mail. Simply contact customer service and they will route you to the appropriate department. Then you explain your circumstances behind the late payment.
In this conversation you should be nice and respectful. I also suggest you emphasize that you want to maintain a good relationship with the lender and continue to use his services and you would appreciate any help they can offer.
This negative mark can be removed by the lender because they choose what items to report to the credit bureaus. Furthermore this 7 year mark is only a maximum of how long a negative item can stay on your credit report. There is no minimum for the amount of time a negative mark can be reported. Thus a lender can remove a mark any time they see fit.
- You can dispute the late payment.
This is done be disputing the mark directly with the credit bureau. This method can be done yourself by sending in a credit repair letter in which you state why the mark is inaccurate and should be removed.
Then the bureau will conduct an investigation and if the mark is unverifiable or inaccurate it must be removed. The fact is many lenders are unwilling to spend the money or resources verifying negative marks. Thus once an investigation occurs it is very likely the negative mark will be removed.
If you have had trouble remove a late payment or have other negative marks on your credit report I suggest a credit repair firm. They have more advanced techniques to dispute negative marks such as; creditor direct intervention, debt validation and escalated dispute information requests.
In sum, you can have late payments removed from your credit report. However it is probably only worth it to remove late payments that show 90 days or more. 30 day and 60 day late payments will ususally not damage your score too much.
