repairing a credit report

January 8, 2005 1:18 AM

I'm in college in the U.S., and have a few state student loans. They were under a forebearance that I once requested, which ended four months ago. I didn't realize this, and ignored the mail that was sent about it because I thought it was the usual mail they send me about how I have a loan and ads for consolidation. I just recently got this fixed and the forebearance backdated so it will have another year from when it ended. But I now have two 60-day late marks on my otherwise good credit report. Anything I can do to get rid of them?
posted by anonymous to Work & Money (5 answers total)

See AskMe credit discussions here and here. (I'm also in the middle of trying to repair my credit so I had these bookmarked).
posted by trey at 5:11 AM on January 8, 2005

Failing that you can get it fixed, there are some advantages to having bad credit. For example, your identity isn't worth stealing... I'm only about a third joking, actually. I did a credit history a year or so ago and found the remains of an obvious identity-theft attempt that failed because I had no credit.
posted by lodurr at 8:25 AM on January 8, 2005

I think you can have a notation added to each 60 day notice indicating what happened and that you have reached a new agreement with the lender.

Same thing happened to us years ago; my wife had student loans that the forebearance ran out on, and in our case we didn't actually get any mail saying we were late. We found out when we applied for a mortgage. We got the mortgage after several months of trying to get the lender to rearrange a payment schedule. Once that happened, we got the mortgage.
posted by Doohickie at 10:01 AM on January 8, 2005

I think you can write a letter petitioning to have them removed. I would say you never received the notices or something.
posted by xammerboy at 2:49 PM on January 8, 2005

Even if you're stuck with the negatives on your credit report, when it comes to a major purchase like a house, you can potentially write a letter of explanation to the lender. I had to do this to explain something on my credit report when I got a mortgage. The loan officer basically dictated what I needed to say (it was only about a paragraph), and apparently that sufficed!
posted by kimota at 3:27 PM on January 8, 2005