Discard Payment Notice For Free

A pay for delete letter is a legitimate tool to use for negotiating with debt collectors. While many debt collection agencies will not accept this type of letter, some will, and you have nothing to lose by sending one to your creditor.

The simplest approach is to just ask your lender to take the late payment off your credit report. That should remove the information at the source so that it won't come back later. You can request the change in two ways: Call your lender on the phone and ask to have the payment deleted.

Check Your Credit for Free If you haven't checked your credit report recently, you can get your free Experian credit report online and look for late payments in your accounts. You can then dispute inaccuracies and monitor your progress as you build your credit and recover from past late payments.

If you already paid the debt: Ask for a goodwill deletion Write the collector a letter explaining your circumstances and why you would like the debt removed, such as if you're about to apply for a mortgage. There's no guarantee your request will be accepted, but there's no harm in asking.

A goodwill deletion is the only way to remove a legitimate paid collection from a credit report. This strategy involves you writing a letter to your lender. In the letter, you need to explain your circumstances and why you would like the record of the paid collection to be removed from your credit report.

And late payments can stay on your credit reports for up to seven years. If you find a late payment in your credit reports that shouldn't be there, you can file a dispute and ask the corresponding creditor or credit bureau to remove the inaccurate information.

Newer credit-scoring models from FICO® and VantageScore (like FICO Score 9 and VantageScore 3.0) ignore zero-balance collection accounts. So paying off a collections account could raise your scores with lenders that use these models.