COVID 19 has affected everyone, including your creditors. However, many lenders, to be nice or to maintain good public relations, have offered to defer your mortgage payments or credit card debts, due to them from consumers such as you, for several months. While they may avoid dunning you for your payment for the next several months, you must know effect this should have on your credit report.
If your lender agrees to defer your payments….
You should review your credit report, ideally, every month, to make sure that your lender follows through on its promise. If it does, its trade line on each of your credit reports to which it reports, should reflect:
Monthly payment – $0
Status – Current
Past due balance – $0
If any of these fields, on a deferred balance is reporting anything different, then you have been screwed by your lender. Prospective creditors do not mind deferred payments. They do mind past due balances and current statues that are late. Moreover, a creditor reporting a monthly payment due when you are in deferral is patently lying to prospective creditors about what you owe at that time. If you are in a deferral with your lender, you owe no monthly payment.
Yes…..even the big banks and credit reporting agencies get it wrong.
If you have never had trouble with your bank or a credit reporting agency, then you have not crossed over onto the dark side. We are a credit repair law firm and we have literally seen thousands and thousands of credit reports that have been improperly damaged by large banks and creditors and reported to credit reporting agencies. We make our living fixing credit reports and making the defendants pay our fees and costs. We have been doing this work for the past 13 years. So, do you still think this only happens occasionally?
Protect yourself. There are so many free ways to get your credit reports these days. You can sign up for a credit monitoring service such as Identity IQ or Experian.com. Or you can sign up for free credit pulls with CreditKarma.com. However you choose to review your credit reports is up to you. However, only you can protect yourself from these large banks and creditors that are more interested in getting your money than they are in reporting your information correctly.
Call us at Credit Repair Lawyers of America at (248) 353-2882 for a free, no obligation consultation. We can help you obtain your credit reports and we will even review them for you, for free. We can fix your credit reports for free. If we have to file a lawsuit to fix your credit reports, it will cost you nothing out of pocket to do so. You can email us at [email protected] for more information.
Gary Nitzkin, Esq.
Licensed in Michigan only