Disputing Items to Improve Credit Report
Disputing the remark seems unlikely to move your score, since it is just that -- a remark.  It's hard to say whether the scoring models can/do read the remarks and incorporate them (somehow) into the scoring metric itself. Disputing the revolving account that should be reported as closed is a different matter.  The question there would be what the status of that account is/was.  In other words, is it showing as an open collection or some other status which would indicate the creditor still has a pending claim?  If so, disputing it might have some effect, although nobody would be able to tell you for certain or even how much your score might be affected. If, as you say, that account should have been part of the bankruptcy package then getting that corrected could be important enough to achieve what you're looking for.  You can try it and see, but even if the effect is minor, you still want your credit report to be a true reflection of the facts. I hope this helps. Good luck! "A few points: The reason your lender is asking you to be above 580 is because that is the magic number for an FHA loan where your down payment would be only 3.5% (the US Government effectively subsidizes the rest of your down pmt). If you had a score lower than that (but still above 500), you will need to put 10% down which is still less than the typical 20% down pmt that many of us make. It's not that you can't get a loan with a score < 580. It's that you don't qualify for the ""maximum financing"" thru FHA. You should do some research and decide if you even want an FHA loan. And keep in mind, you will throw away some money every month towards PMI (mortgage insurance) if you do FHA. Many insist on 20% down pmt to avoid that. How exactly these two items will effect your score is another question. It's possible that having accounts added back as revolving accounts could negatively / not positively effect it. It will likely effect it in some way and I'm not 100% which way or if it would be very significant. You may want to dispute both of those items regardless if you can't afford anything but an FHA loan. If that's the case, then you may have nothing to lose. You might also want to shop around for mortgage lenders. And look for a ""portfolio lender."" These type of lenders general have more flexibility in who they can lend to and the type of loans."
It costs money to pull credit information, and there's a record of who requested the info. And hard pulls are only a temporary, short-term ding on your score. Basically, if someone wants to make trouble,  there are better ways to do so. No credit bureau wants incorrect data, for obvious reasons, but it happens. That's one reason why they let you get access to your credit score, to check it the data is correct and make the 'product' (data about you) better.   Nope, that's not why you can get free access to your credit report.  The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) is why.  FCRA requires any credit reporting agency to provide you a free report upon request every 12 months.  Prior to this law, credit agencies made you pay to see your report including if you wanted it to dispute errors.  They only care about the dollars they get from having this data. FCRA removed one of their revenue streams.  If free locking moves forward, that will remove another. So expect them to fight it. A credit card can be a long running line of credit that will help to boost your FICO score.  However if you have student loans, a mortgage, or car payments those will work just as well. If you ever get to the point where you don't have any recent lines of credit, this may eventually end up hurting your score, but until then you really don't need any extras. "I was I a similar position as you, and sometimes credit bureaus might be difficult to deal with, especially when high amounts of money are involved. To make the long story short, someone opened a store credit card under my name and made a charge of around 3k. After reporting this to the bureaus, they did not want to remove the account from my credit report citing that the claim was ""frivolous"". After filing a police report, the police officer gave me the phone number for the fraud department of this store credit card, and after they investigated, they removed the account from my credit. I would suggest to do the following: Communicating with Creditors and Debt Collectors You have the right to:  Stop creditors and debt collectors from   reporting fraudulent accounts. After you give them a copy of a valid   identity theft report, they may not report fraudulent accounts to the   credit reporting companies. Get copies of documents related to the   theft of your identity, like transaction records or applications for   new accounts. Write to the company that has the documents, and include   a copy of your identity theft report. You also can tell the company to   give the documents to a specific law enforcement agency. Stop a debt   collector from contacting you. In most cases, debt collectors must   stop contacting you after you send them a letter telling them to stop.   Get written information from a debt collector about a debt, including   the name of the creditor and the amount you supposedly owe. If a debt   collector contacts you about a debt, request this information in   writing. I know that you said that the main problem was that your credit account was combined with another. But there might be a chance that identity theft was involved. If this is the case, and you can prove it, then you might have access to more tools to help you. For example, you can file a report with the FTC, and along with a police report, this can be a powerful tool in stopping these charges. Feel free to go to the identitytheft.gov website for more information." This is more of a legal question than a monetary one. You can try to negotiate with the debt owner as Pete B. suggests. Alternatively, you can ignore them and see what happens. They might sue you for the 400 plus costs, or maybe not. That is a pretty small amount for a lawyer to show up in a court of law. If you go to court, you can win by testifying that you returned the box and the charge is invalid. If you testify in court that you did not return the box, then you will lose. Sometimes a debt collector will just file a credit complaint against you and you would have to go to court to get that complaint removed from your record with the credit agency. The loan owner has no idea whether you returned the box at all. All they have is a debt security which simply says who owes the money and how much it is. In a court room they have zero evidence against you (unless you said something to them and they wrote it down or recorded it). "http://annualcreditreport.com gives you free access to your 3 credit bureau records. (Annual, not ""free"". The ""free"" guys will try to sell you something.)" "My sister had a similar problem and went to an actual lawyer, not a  ""credit repair agency"".  The lawyers settled her debt for a lot less than she owed, and she  also got a bonus: one of the creditors called her repeatedly, even  after her lawyers had told them not to.  The lawyers ended up getting her an extra $40,000. Combined with the  debt settlement, she actually came out ahead.  Of course, her credit score went down, but it recovered in a couple of  years." You could make an entry for the disputed charge as if you were going to lose the dispute, and a second entry that reverses the charge as if you were going to win the dispute.  You could then reconcile the account by including the first charge in the reconciliation and excluding the reversal until the issue has been resolved. The best we can do in the Equifax case is freeze (not lock) our credit files at the credit bureaus and use the free annual credit reports via FTC.GOV. Unfreezing is an extra step one would have to go through before opening a new credit line, renting a new place, getting utilities hooked up, etc.  But the freeze (versus the lock) essentially makes one’s data worthless to the credit reporting agencies. "Patience has never been my strong suit Unfortunately this is what you need to build up credit. The activities that increase your credit score are paying your bills on time and not using too much of the available credit that you do have. The rest (age of accounts, recent pulls, etc.) are short-term indicators that indicate changes in behavior that will make lenders pause and understand what the reasons behind the events are. Also keep in mind that your credit score shouldn't run your life.  It should be a passive indicator of your financial habits - not something that you actively manipulate.   Is there anything I can do to raise my score without having to take out a loan with interest? Pay your bills on time, and don't take out more credit than you need.  You're already in the ""excellent"" category, so there's no reason to panic or try to manipulate it.  Even if you temporarily dip below, if you need to make a big purchase (house), your loan-to-value and debt/income ratio will be much bigger factors in what interest rate you can get.  As far as the BofA card goes, if you don't need it, cancel it.  It might cause a temporary dip in your credit, but it will go away quickly, and you're better off not having credit cards that you don't need." "you can relate everything on a credit report, and how things are calculated, to life scenarios. thats a 100% fact, and thats what people need to go by when designing their credit dicipline/diet. utilization: any kind of resource in life. water, food, energy, and etc. who would you want to live with more, the guy that just eats way too much, uses way too much energy than they need, and wastes way more water than they need? assuming there was no water cycle. payment history: speaks for itself derogatory remarks: s*** happens. thats what makes life life, but when given chances to fix your mistakes and own up to them, like i and every other responsible adult have done, and you dont, thats living up to the exact definition of derogatory. disrespecting and not caring. who wants to lend to someone who doesnt care? so if youre not gonna care, we will just put this special little remark in the derogatory section and show that you dont care about when you make mistakes. f*** it right? lol. well, thats what that section is for. showing you wont try to fix things when they go sour. if i had a guy who was fixing my roof, and did a bad job, but did everything he could to fix it, i wouldnt give him a bad rep at all. if a guy messed up my roof, and just said cya thanks for your money, hes getting a derogatory remark. credit age: just like life. showing the ability to maintain EVERY other aspect of a report for X amount of time. its like getting old as a person. after X amount of years, a lot of people will be able to say more about you as a person. whether youre a real male reproductive organ or an amazing guy. total accounts: is like taking on jobs as a self employed person or any business. if you have a lot of jobs, people must want you to do their work. it shows how people ""like you."" hard inquiries: this is the one category of them all i dont fully agree on, can go either way, and i hate it. i really cant think of a life scenario to relate it to, so i kind of think its a prevention mechanism/keep a person in check kind of thing. like to save them from themself and save the lenders. for example, if a guy has great utilization, and just goes insane applying for credit cards, hell get everyone of them because hes showing almost no utilization. then said guy goes and looses his job, but since he racked up 50 cards at 1k each, now he can destroy 50k in credit. thats just my take, but thats EXACTLY how i look at it from TU/EX/EQs point of view." Some aspects of your general financial lifestyle make a big difference in your score. Always pay late; declare bankruptcy; have bills go to collection, these will hurt your overall score.  Some aspects of your life start with a low score and rise over time: the number of years you have had credit. Some only have short term and transient impacts: what is your utilization rate today; when was your last hard pull. Any agonizing you do over the transient aspects during a period of time when your score doesn't matter, is a waste of energy. If you are looking for a new mortgage, or a another type of loan, then act in a way that will improve your score. But If you see no immediate need then don't sweat the details. If your credit limit is too low for your lifestyle, then ask for it to be increased. Just don't ask for the increase a few days before you put in the auto loan application. What I would prefer is top open a new category charges under dispute and park the amount there. It can be made as an account as well in place of a income or expenses category. This way your account will reconcile and also you will be able to track the disputes. I notice that a lot happened four months ago. You were denied credit twice. Your income went up from $20k to $60k. I'm wondering if you were denied credit based on your $20k income. Since you couldn't provide proof of your income I wonder if they used $0 for your income.  Debt to income ratio is one significant factor included in the credit score calculation. You may not have a lot of debt, but if you don't have any income even a few hundred dollars on a credit card would throw your debt to income ratio into a panic. I'm assuming that your change from $20k to $60k income involved a change of jobs. Perhaps now you can provide proof of income. You would certainly need to do that before being approved for a mortgage.  Well that's my two cents about what may (or may not) have gone wrong last time. As for what to do next I would agree that the most helpful thing you could do is check your credit score and fix any errors that might negatively impact your credit score. (There might also be non-errors that need addressed such as open credit accounts that you thought you had closed.) When building credit history, time is on your side. If you just go on living your life and paying your bills promptly, your credit will slowly climb to an acceptable level. Unfortunately in the time frame you mentioned (~1 year) there isn't really enough time to build it significantly.  You bring up a valid point about credit applications reducing your credit score. Of course, that effect is somewhat minimal and temporary (2 yrs according to the thread linked to above). But again 1 year is not enough to recover. If you're considering applying for additional credit as a means to improve your credit score it may be too late to reap the benefits before your mortgage application. Of course if you could pay off any debts, that would help your debt to income ratio. But it would also reduce any house down payment you could save up and thereby increase the amount of your mortgage.  Better just save those pennies (or preferably Washingtons and Benjamins) to put toward a down payment. It appears all you have to do is submit a form. It might be better if she submitted it herself instead of you doing it on her behalf.  All natural persons (individuals) and non-natural persons (businesses)   are entitled to access and inspect the data held on record about them   in the Central Credit Information System (KHR).