Credit Repair Trick: Small Medical Collections and How to Remove them

You would not believe how often I see medical bill collections for $44 or $23. It’s exceedingly common. However, a $4,500 collection and a $45 collection will hurt your credit score the same amount. Credit repair is fairly easy if you know what to do.

So how do we knock out those little collections and immediately boost your credit score? Get them deleted.

Here’s how:

You’re going to need to call the doctor’s office directly or AT&T or DirectTV (whoever the debtor is – not the collection agency – you want to call the people who want to get paid). Once you get the billing person on the phone, offer to pay the balance (or less if you’re feeling like a master negotiator). Here’s the most important part, only pay in exchange for deletion from your credit report. DO NOT have them mark the debt paid off nor zero balance. I would rather you not do anything at all than pay off the debt.

What happens if you pay off a collection and the debtor marks it “paid” on your credit report? The time clock starts over! If your collection was 5 years old, you only had 2 more years until the collection would have just fallen off your report. If you simply “pay off” the collection, the time clock starts over and a fully paid, zero balance collection will negatively affect your credit for another 7 years! The magic word is DELETION and a letter from the debtor saying that there will be a deletion.

Let’s be honest, these companies just want their money. They don’t want to ruin your life (credit) forever and ensure that you can’t ever buy a house. They just want their money. You need to know how to fix credit.