Credit report questions

Zelie

I set up accounts with both Experian and Equifax today. I have a couple of questions about the information which came up.

1) I have a default listed relating to a credit card I had while at uni. That is marked as being paid off in June of 2004. Am I right in thinking that this should disappear from my report in June of this year?

2) I have some credit accounts which I don't use. I take it that it would be best to write to them and formally close the accounts rather than have them sleeping on my file?

2a) One of these accounts is a catalogue-dealie which I accessed online only. It shows zeros and an 's' (i.e. paid the money in full) and then nothing from 2008 as I haven't bought from them since. Does this matter? And if it is best to formally end the account then how does one go about disconnecting/ending with this company. (It's a good company and I probably want to buy from them in the future but not under a credit agreement).

Thanks for any guidance.

Sorry if this is in the wrong place!

Tixy

Hi

1) the default should disapper 6years from the original default date (not the date you settled the default).

2) Usually yes, although if you have old credit cards and you have any current credit cards with a balance you might want to see if the old accounts will give you any promotional balance transfer deals.
Also you need to consider what closing the accounts will do to your debt to credit ratio. Lenders look at both your credit to income ratio and your debt to credit ratio, so if by closing the old accounts you then show as using 95% of your available credit this might not be a good idea (its a hard balance to strike).

2a) well it will be contributing to your overall credit availability so if this is pretty high you could consider closing it and you would probably need to write to close it. If your total credit available is not high compared to your income, or if the limit on this account is negligible then it may not matter that it remains open.

Zelie

Thanks Tixy,

I'm a little confused about the dates for the default. Equifax say the default date is May 2004 and it was settled June 2004. Experian say the default date was 9th July 2004. Would it be best to just ignore this til the end of July and if it doesn't drop off both by then have another look at things (I don't need any new credit or anything so I don't mind waiting).

The things I was thinking about closing are the defaulted account (or has that closed when I repaid them?) and two catalogue accounts that I just got to boost my credit rating. The credit available from them is 150 and 650 though this is not listed in my summary of available credit from Experian. I'm not sure if that matters or not as I haven't used either in quite a while. If I close them then this would leave me with only one credit card with just under 3000 plus the defaulted account which should go soon.

It's hard to know what's best to do to get squeaky clean. I pretty much don't need credit and my CC is just for groceries etc and I pay it off every month. Other than that I use my salary only. Is it perhaps best to keep the smaller ones just to show that multiple people are willing to lend to me?

Tixy

From the sounds of things it seems like it won't make much difference to close them, so yes you could keep them open.

Regarding the default, it should be the same for both agencies and you could kick up a fuss to find out why the experian one is wrong, but to be honest it might take until July to try and sort it so I might be tempted to just leave it to disappear on its own.

Zelie

Yeah, it's the same default. I guess someone just got their dates wrong a little. It doesn't make much difference so I'll just wait til July and check up on it.

Cheers Tixy, you da bomb.