How Can I Get Something Moved From a Negative on a Credit Report to a Positive?

In life, people often try to turn negative things into a positive, but this rarely happens with credit reports. Once a negative hits your report it remains a negative for most of its life. Few, if any, negative items can improve the creditworthiness of a borrower.

Identification

You usually cannot turn a negative item to a positive; you can only dispute it and have the agencies remove it or wait for it to stop negatively affecting your credit history. Collection accounts, for example, do not improve your credit report even if you pay it, so you must wait seven years for it to be eliminated from your report.

Considerations

Technically, all items on a credit report are only "potentially" negative because a black mark that normally lowers a credit score can raise it. This might happen, for example, with an installment account. You need at least one installment and one revolving line of credit to have a good mix of credit -- worth 10 percent of your score. It might be better to have an installment account with a delinquency than no installment accounts at all if the boost to the "mix of credit" outweighs the negative on the account. The Fair Issac Corporation, FICO, model does count installments once the borrower pays off the entire balance.

Dispute Process

Creditors can make mistakes when updating your account with the credit bureaus, or the agencies might cause the errors themselves. You could, for example, pay a bill on time and the creditor or agency erroneously reports it as a missed payment. In this case, you can dispute the item with either party -- preferably the credit bureau -- and have them update the account. Most credit reports contain some kind of error, but they are usually inconsequential, such as an employer for which you never worked.

Tip

Never assume that you can dispute a negative item or that a negative might help your score. If you have a negative item on your account, build a positive payment history to outweigh some of its effects. On-time debt payments and a reduction of debt over several months will get you back on track to excellent credit once again.