How Can I Remove A Judgment From My Credit Report?
Before answering this question it is important to understand that your credit record contains two quite different types of reporting information. The first is a record of your credit history and your current financial obligations which are reported to the credit agencies by your creditors. In effect this means that your creditors are making the entries on your credit record and that they can also amend and remove those entries. The second is a record of information which is a matter or public record and which is collected from the court system and debt collection agencies which cannot be amended unless the public record itself is amended. This latter category will include such things as judgments, bankruptcies and foreclosures.
Against this background you will see that removing a judgment, which is a matter of public record, can be very difficult and will involve a two stage process of first having the entry removed from the public record and then removed from your credit record. In most cases this will be an uphill battle and can also be costly.
This said, there are ways to have a judgment removed if you feel strongly enough about doing so and how you go about it will depend upon whether or not the judgment has been satisfied.
Let us assume for example that the courts have awarded a $2,000 legal judgment against you but that you have not yet made payment of this money. To a certain extent you are still in a reasonably strong bargaining position because you are still holding the money. Accordingly you could try approaching your creditor with a conditional offer to satisfy the judgment.
What you are trying to do is to remove the judgment but, in order to do this, you also need to remove the case which gave rise to the judgment in the first place. This means that you should offer to pay your creditor only on condition that he file a Stipulation to Vacate the Judgment, Reinstate the Case and Dismiss it with Prejudice. So what does this mean? The Stipulation simply means that the legal judgment was never made and that the case is being re-opened in order to allow you to dispute the claim. At the same time application is being made by your creditor to the courts to dismiss the case without any right to re-open it. In other words, the clock is being wound back to the day before the court case began and the public record will reflect that there was in fact no such case. Once this has been done your credit record must then be amended to accurately reflect the public record.
Now this can often work since the procedure is not in fact too difficult to accomplish. The creditor wants his money and, in most cases, the court could not care less as long as the matter is satisfied with the agreement of both parties.
The situation however is somewhat different once the judgment has been satisfied and your creditors have been paid since you have lost your bargaining chip. Nevertheless, it is still possible to have the judgment removed from your credit record as long as you can find a way to secure the co-operation of your creditor. In this case you will need to approach things in a very 'businesslike' manner and it would be advisable to seek to assistance of an attorney.
What you will need to do is to approach your creditor and offer him a sum of money in return for his consent to Vacate the Judgment. In essence, you are offering him a sum of money in exchange for a service which in this case will be his signature on the documents required to Vacate the Judgment, re-open the case and Dismiss it with Prejudice.
A local attorney at law would draw up the necessary documents for you and you would then pay the creditor by cashier's check which would be exchanged for the signed documents. Your attorney would then lodge the documents for you with the court which, once the documents are filed, will then provide you with a document dismissing the original case which can then be forwarded to the credit agencies with a request that the entry be removed from your record on the grounds that it was made in error.
When it comes to removing a judgment from your credit record you need to think long and hard about just how important it is to you to have the record removed. If the judgment is for a relatively small debt then it is probably not worth trying to remove it and you should simply let it run its course. However, if it is for a substantial sum of money and is clearly hurting you financially then it might well be worth having it removed. For example, if you are applying for a mortgage and could get 1% off your interest rate without this entry on your record then it could be worth trying to remove it. After all, 1% over 25 or 30 years could add up to a lot of money.
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