Credit Advice

There are a couple of factors that may be affecting you Janette. If your accounts were very old (the bad ones), it might have actually had the negative effect of making the "average age of your accounts" LOWER when they were removed - thereby negatively impacting your score by some of the amount you are seeing. However, it sounds as if there are either multiple errors or multiple problems with your credit to be receiving a score of lower than 600, so it could be one of two things: a) you have not given enough time for the changes to take effect and / or b) you still have your own outstanding credit issues (including not having much credit possibly, now that these are removed). Keep in mind that sometimes, no matter who is at fault, it takes a bit of time for the records to get cleaned up and may take some time for you to rebuild.

How many accounts do you have and what type are they? Are you paying them on time? If so, you should see your score rebound rather quickly. If these do not account for your errors, you need to scrutinize ALL 3 CREDIT REPORTS to see what is causing your score to remain that low. Age of accounts is a heavily weighted item and is enough by itself to drop you 50+ points if you don't have many accounts. Don't worry though - 'cause if that's the only thing keeping you down, time will heal the credit score fairly quickly.

Also, keep in mind that depending on what those fraudulent accounts looked like, you may have cut your open credit by a sizable amount, making your debt-to-income ratio lower and also potentially accounting for a nice chunk of the decline.

I've had the same experience with correcting errors and credit scores drops. I have two installments that were not reporting monthly. One had not reported my payments or  updated my balances for over four month. The other one had not reported by payments and updated my balances for three months. So, I disputed them because my credit score had just decreased due to high balances on my revolving account and because of these two installment accounts that were being reported as recent inquiries and fairly new accounts. The result of disputing them was having the accounts totally deleted from my reports. It was hardly the outcome I was desiring. So, my credit score decreased because my number of accounts (open and closed) had decreased. It's so totally frustrating. I've been trying to get errors corrected on my reports for at least 18 months becasue I want to refinance my home. The creditors and credit bureaus are impeding my progress. And I'm going to lose the window of opportunity with the lower  interest rates. I know that if I had missed a payment, it would be reported within a day. I have reams and reams of paper sitting in my office and it all has to do with correcting errors on my credit bureua reports. I've called my creditors to ask why my accounts are not being reported and they don't know. Does anyone have any suggestions?