Daniel Rosen warns credit repair pros that disputing errors on an old account can backfire. If a creditor removes an 11-year-old open account entirely, the client's credit score drops sharply because they lose years of positive history and available credit. Dispute only the specific late payment, not the whole account.
Your client has a credit card. It's open, it's current. They've had it for 11 years, but there's something attached to it that they don't like. Maybe it's an old late payment from 2021, so they dispute it and say it's not mine. But here's the trap. If the creditor can't verify it, or if they decide they'd rather not deal with it, that entire trade line can get deleted. And that 11-year-old account was doing a lot of quiet work. It was carrying their average age of accounts. It was carrying available credit that kept their utilization low, but once it's been deleted, the score can drop sometimes by a lot, and that client came to you for the score to go up, and instead it goes down. Here's what to do instead. Before you dispute anything, ask what it's connected to. If it's attached to an open positive account, you dispute the specific inaccuracy, like the late payment itself, and not the account. You never want to say, this isn't mine, on an account that is theirs.
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