By: Arthur Cooper
Submitted: 2010-10-11 12:18:53 | Word Count: 664
Credit reports can be a tricky nightmare, but if you pay your bills on time and do everything just right, your credit report can be an absolute gold mine. However, some people enter into circumstances that create more of a nightmare than a gold mine, and they end up with charge offs. Do you know how long charge off will stay on your credit report after they have been posted?
First, you must understand what a charge off really is. Once a creditor has decided that you are not going to pay a bill—in other words, you haven’t paid it in more than six months—they will charge off your account and take it off their financial books for the year.
Next, the creditor will attempt to contact you and make you pay them back—sometimes to the point of harassment. In the meantime, the creditor is going to turn around and report your non-payment activities to at least one credit bureau—if not all of them.
[ advertisement ]
This puts a black mark on your credit report that will stay there for a while unless you can find a way to have it rescinded. Creditors do occasionally agree to rescind the charge off from your credit report, but you must first meet certain conditions.
How do you determine how long will charge off stay on your credit report? The general answer is seven years. Seven years is a long time to deal with bad credit, and the clock starts as soon as the account went bad, or delinquent. In other words, if your ABC account was officially delinquent as of October 15, 2001, the charge off should come off your report on October 15, 2008.
There are two kinds of charge offs. One is the unpaid charge off, and the other is the paid charge off. Obviously it would be better if the charge off is paid, but when it comes to a big black mark on your credit score, there really is not that much of a difference.
One thing to keep in mind is that charge offs will not start over again if you pay on them after the charge off has occurred. People who know that they have a charge off on their record are afraid that if they pay on the charge off, the black mark could show up for another seven years, and this is simply not true.
Now that you know how long will charge off stay on your credit report, you can rest a little easier. While it may not make things immediately better for you, at least you can develop a plan of action for the future, and you’ll have a solid idea of what steps to take if you run into the problem again.
