Page 31 - Winning The Credit Game Bundle (CK Patrick)

WINNING AT PAYMENT HISTORY 19

ment, apply for a business loan, buy or lease a car, or get a job which
requires a credit check before the seven-year statutory limit occurs, you
will want to resolve these negative items and/or pursue options to
raise your credit score immediately such as those we discuss here. But
there are also times when you can use the statutory limit to your
advantage.
If a negative item on your credit report is already six years old and
you owe a lot of money on that bill, it might make sense to simply wait
for it to fall off your report before making a major financial move or
trying to contact that company. If not paying this bill means saving tens
of thousands of dollars, waiting a few months for that derogatory
mark to disappear may make more sense than paying.
One other piece of information that is vital to know is this: if you
contact your creditor about your debt, you restart the age of the
account. This means that the clock starts counting down from “zero”
again, and it will take seven years after the last date of activity.
This is why it’s important to pay attention to the age of your
accounts before taking action on them. If an account of yours is already
five or six years old, contacting the creditor to pay or negotiate may
result in losing your ability to have the red mark automatically
removed from your report in just one or two years without the neces-
sity to pay.
Keep this in mind when filling out the following chapters, which
will invite you to make a strategy to pay off your outstanding debts
while saving as much money as possible. If a debt is already six years
old and you don’t need your credit history improved immediately in
the next few months, you can omit that debt from your calculations as
it should soon automatically disappear from your credit report on
its own.

KNOW YOUR INTEREST RATES

If you have taken out multiple loans, there’s a good chance they have
different interest rates. Do you know what your interest rate is on each
loan, mortgage, and credit card you have? If not, I want you to go