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I need some advice please and this is a "not so common situation". I have already started the dispute process with the credit bureaus but so far they haven't removed any late payments, which has caused us a lot of problems. I didn't know these were on there until we sold our house and went to buy another one. I have all my facts written down and will copy and paste it, let me know what you think? Also, when disputing this should I send a copy of everything that happened to the credit bureaus in full detail or will they not care? I bought my home in October of 2001 with a total monthly payment on a fixed interest rate of $665.33. Our payment stayed the same until around 2010. It began going up more and more with no explanation as to why. While trying to make our regular monthly payment we realized it was constantly changing. By 2013 our payment was extremely high. After many conversations with many different Chase customer service employees we finally found out it was due to escrow and the homeowners insurance going from $400 yearly to $3,141.78. We were never informed of the price increase from Cotton states or Chase and had to make several phone calls to Chase before we finally found out why our payments were so high. Living on a budget and having our house payments go higher and higher made things very difficult. This went on from 2010 until January of 2013. We then cancelled our insurance with Cotton States and got homeowners insurance with Shelter Insurance with a premium of $971.00. Chase never canceled the homeowners insuarnce with Cotton States even though we sent a policy cancelation letter, so this had us paying insurance for both Shelter and Cotton states which was a combined amount of $4,112.78 a year which sent our payments even higher. By now our payments were close to or over $1000 a month. I do not have a copy of that and Chase refused to send us one. We recently moved and all my paper work is stored away, the last high payment invoice I could find was the $864.77 from 2012 but it went up even higher by 2013. Every month we would call Chase to resolve this issue which by the time it was resolved the payments were once again late, and month after month Cotton states was put back on our account even after a customer service rep said is was taking off. This was not fully resolved until the end of 2013 which by this time our account was so messed up we had a hard time catching up. Chase reccomended we do a loan modification and sent us all the paper work and during this time we were not supposed to make a payment which now reflects 90 day lates on our credit history. We never did the modification nor should we have had to since this was not any fault of ours. Cotton states finally refunded us for the money they owed us for the year of 2013. By the Fall of 2014 Chase finally had our account straightened out. Our payments finally went back down to where they were supposed to be and not a single late payment was made until we sold our house in 2016. Since then we have been trying to get a mortgage and these late paymets have made it impossible. I had no idea these were even on my credit report until I went to get a new mortgage. We contacted chase and asked for records of all the problems we had from 2010-2014 and they would not send it to us. We needed a history of the insurance increase and the escrow showing they paid 2 homeowners, which they would not send either. They only sent us payment history from 2015 & 2016 which did not help us when applying for a mortgage since this didn't show all the problems and why we were late throughout 2010-2014.

I had some late payments on credit cards over a year ago but none since. How long does this hurt my credit score if I no longer have a late payment? And by how much? In other words, I've been on some sites that have a simulator that allows you to enter some changes to see what you can do to improve your credit score and by how much. One of those is to pay down your debt. My question is, what is my incentive to pay down debt - for the purpose of raising my credit score - if that late payment history will hold it down for 7 years (or whatever the period is)?

I was 60 days late on my auto loan and this caused my credit report to plunge big time. I have paid on the account and got it up to current status but my question is this: Will this remain on my credit report for up to 7 years? Even though I am caught up on these bills is this going to remain as a negative factor on my credit report and is there anything I can do to have it removed? About a year ago I hired Lexington Law to remove items on my credit report and my experience is that it is nearly impossible to remove items that are negative when they involve financial lending such as a bank loan or credit card. Is there anything I can do? I would like to think that by next month I can just refresh my credit report and it will show my status as current and this will be behind me but I seriously doubt that's the case. I'm pretty sure I'll be stuck with this for another 7 years so I really hope I have some options here.