Chapter Seven
Bad Credit Listings: They're NOT
All Created Equal
Page 1 of 4
As mentioned previously, negative listings on your credit report are the biggest factor in lowering the credit score. If you're out to improve your credit score, any "negatives" on your three credit reports are definitely "job one." But, not every negative listing impacts your credit score the same. We'll list them all and rate them one-by-one on the same ten-point scale we used before with 10 being the most severe.
Public Records/Bankruptcy
Level of Importance: 10 out of 10
Tax liens, judgments, and of course bankruptcies are full-blooded credit-killers. They are the nuclear devices of credit devastation. When you read that bad credit stays with you for "seven to ten years," the "ten years" part refers to public records. That's the bad news. The good news is that the credit scoring models don't really know how to read public records very well. Since public records are all listed differently and since this information comes from county courthouses all over the nation, there's very little consistency between these records. For the most part, these records are simply text fields that the scoring model must somehow "read." Also, public records must be pulled down by hand by the credit bureaus. This is difficult, error-prone and expensive. In short, there are many holes in the public record reporting system and most of these inefficiencies lean to the consumer's favor. But ANY kind of public record must be made to disappear (even paid judgments, paid liens etc.). (Saying much more on this subject will lead you down the path toward becoming an "expert," and we've already decided that you'd rather learn wakeboarding or crochet then become one of those. So, we'll just stop here.)
- Credit Revolution: Path of the Smart Consumer
© 2007 John C. Heath, Esq., Dr. Randy Padawer, Jayson R. Orvis. All Rights Reserved.
Published by Far Cliffs Multimedia, LLC
More information about fixing bad credit
What is a bad credit score?What does it mean to fix bad credit?
Fixing Your Credit Becomes Necessary in a Broken Credit System
*Important: While the testimonials and other information on this website may be exciting, Lexington Law promises only to perform the steps we've agreed to in each client's case and to charge each month only for steps already completed. As with any legal work, no outcome is promised. Your results will vary. **The number of items removed represents the combined removals for all three credit bureaus. For example, if a single questionable negative item is removed from all three credit reports, it is counted as three separate removals.
© 2009 Lexington Law® All rights reserved. John C. Heath, Attorney at Law, PLLC, d/b/a Lexington Law.
Terms of Use were last updated on . Privacy Policy was last updated on . // 1.0.1