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Removing Late Payments from Your Credit Report

The majority of people know that if they pay their bills late, their credit scores will be negatively affected.  However, one thing that the majority of people do not know is that one late payment on their account is as damaging as a tax lien, a bankruptcy filing, a judgment, a collection or a repossession. It makes no difference whether one is late paying a $75 credit card bill or a $2,000 mortgage payment.  The only thing that actually matters is that you were behind 90 days in paying the balance due. 

Paying your bills on time counts for 35% of your overall credit score.  Timely bill payment is the single most important thing that you can do to maintain a good credit score.  Paying any bill late, for any length of time, is viewed as a sign of possible future non-payment by your creditors and looked upon very negatively.  Late payments remain on your credit report for 7 years from the day of the first payment that you missed. 

A 30 or 60 day late payment will harm your credit score only during the time that it is being reported as being currently past due. 30 or 60 day late payments usually don’t harm your score after the passing of this period unless you continue to make 30 or 60 day late payments continually. 

In the event that you have a few 30-60 day late payments displayed on your credit report, the best thing that you can do is to contact your lenders by phone and ask them politely to remove the listing from your report. Follow up on your conversation with a request in writing asking that these late payments be removed from your reports.  However, if you are someone who makes late payments on a regular basis, getting these listings removed may take a little extra effort. 

As you can see, a 90-120 day late payment is extremely damaging to your credit score. The creditor will usually write off your account at around 90-120 days and it will remain on your report as a charge off for a 7 year period. 

If you are unsuccessful in getting the lender to remove the history of late payments from your report of credit, there are a number of other things that you can do.  One of the best options available to you is to dispute these late payments with the credit bureaus.