Is It Hard to Remove a Judgment?
You fell behind on your payments and your creditor decided to pursue a judgment against you. Even though you appeared at the hearing, your creditor was granted the judgment. Now, you don’t know what to do or where to turn to delete the judgment entry from your credit report.
To make matters worse, you just found out that your credit score has taken a nose-dive because of the judgment. Many people do not know that a court-ordered judgment can be reported on your credit history for 10-12 years. If the debt remains unpaid at the end of this time period, often the judgment can be renewed. In fact, even a judgment which has been paid can stay on your credit report for seven years after it is paid!
Now, you would like to remove the judgment from your credit report. You need to be aware that it is illegal for credit reporting agencies to remove accurate entries. There are only two ways an entry can be legally removed from a credit report. The first way is to prove that an item is inaccurate. The second way is to dispute the item and, if the creditor cannot verify the item within a legally specified time frame, the credit reporting agency is legally required to remove the item. Items which consumers believe are false can be disputed pursuant to the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA). Included in the FCRA, are judgment and public record items.
If you decide that you would like to dispute a judgment entry on your credit report, it will be necessary to send a dispute letter to the credit reporting agencies that are reporting the judgment. Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion are the three major credit reporting agencies. With entries such as credit cards or car loans, the dispute would be forwarded to credit card companies, banks, credit unions, loan companies, car dealerships, etc.
Unlike car loans and credit cards, judgment and public record information is located in governmental buildings and maintained by county personnel. In light of this, a judgment dispute will be forwarded in most cases to the county courthouse in your county. As humans verify this type of information, as opposed to fancy software programs, it normally takes longer to verify this type of dispute and, in many cases, the verification is not able to be completed within the specified time frame of 30 days. When this happens, the credit reporting agency, by law, must remove the judgment entry from your credit report.
If you are hesitant about taking this process on yourself, you might consider employing the services of a seasoned and knowledgeable consumer rights attorney. An attorney who specializes in consumer rights has likely resolved hundreds, if not thousands, of similar cases during his career.
Removing a judgement is possible. Discover the only legal way to remove any questionable credit report judgement at www.creditreportjudgement.com.
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