How to Take Old Debt Out of Your Credit Report

An old debt cannot remain in your credit report indefinitely. The Fair Credit Reporting Act governs American credit reports and the information they contain. Any debts you accrue and do not pay will appear within your credit report for seven years and six months, after which time they will be removed by the credit bureaus. Occasionally, however, an obsolete debt will remain on your credit report, damaging your score, for longer than the time frame allowed. After you ascertain that the reporting period on a debt has expired, you must take steps to have the debt removed.

Instructions

1

Order a copy of your credit report from each credit reporting agency--Experian, TransUnion and Equifax. It is vital that you order your reports from the actual credit bureaus and not a third-party provider as your formal credit reports will contain important dates that third-party credit reports often omit.

2

Review the collection accounts contained within each report and locate the corresponding accounts from the original creditors of the debts. If you cannot locate an original creditor for a collection account on any of your credit reports, this is a good indicator that the reporting period on the debt has expired and the original creditor account has already been removed.

3

Check the dates of any charge-offs from original creditors that are reporting on your credit file. The original reporting date is known as the "date of last activity" and should appear in the upper left corner of the entry. If the date is more than 7 years old, the debt is obsolete and must be removed.

4

Highlight or underline any debts that are clearly obsolete or that you suspect may be obsolete on each copy of your credit report.

5

Mail a copy of each credit report with the questionable information highlighted to the corresponding credit bureaus. Include a letter stating that the reporting period has expired on the debts and they need to be removed.

6

Call each credit bureau in 10 days to verify that the debts in question have been deleted from your credit history.