How To Remove Judgments From Your Credit Report?
A judgment on your credit report can and will adversely affect your credit. However, whilst officially judgments can stay on credit reports for up to 7 years and even longer in the form of bankruptcy and tax lein judgments, it is sometimes possible to remove judgments from credit reports completely, even if a judgment pertains to a debt which you have which you still haven’t serviced fully.
What Is A Judgment On A Credit Report?
If you fail to pay debts which you owe either a bank, individuals such as a minor’s guardians in the form of child support, or for that matter local, state or federal agencies in the form of outstanding tax, your creditors may attempt to have the matter settled in court. In most cases courts will then pass civil judgments against you which stipulate the conditions of an outstanding debt’s repayment and which in most cases will appear on your credit report for 7 years.
How To Remove Judgments From Credit Report Files
Because judgments are entered onto credit files by courts and not creditors or collection agencies, a judgment can only be removed or amended by a court. However, whilst petitioning for judicial review and removal of judgments is possible, such is not always necessary. Rather, courts and intermediate data brokers who are tasked with entering judgments onto credit report files in the first place are notoriously poor at keeping and collating accurate records. How to remove judgments from credit report files therefore largely depends on whether or not a court can substantiate a judgment which has been made against you.
Taking the form of a letter requesting that a court where a judgment was originally passed prove that the judgment itself is valid, courts will in many cases not be able to provide such information and their inability to do so will often be enough to have a judgment removed from your credit file. Alternatively, if a court can provide the information requested, all documents should be scanned minutely for chance errors in details. Everything from inaccurate dates to name and title misspellings can after all, immediately invalidate a judgment, giving you the right to have it expeditiously removed from your credit file.