I work front desk at a hotel but also sometimes work the call center side of the hotel so I frequent this subreddit as well as r/talesfromthefrontdesk. This time however I have a question from the customer side of things (if this isn’t allowed on here please let me know).
So my daughter got her first cc last fall. The card is from a store but is actually one of those credit card companies that owns a lot of the store credit cards. This January she thought that she had paid off the balance but accidentally left 20 cents on it. Cue the $36 late fee after the due date.
They probably sent her an email, but thinking she was all paid off and because she didn’t want to be tempted to buy more stuff she had been deleting all emails from the company without looking at them. When February’s due date came along she got charged a second late fee and at that time they reported her to the credit agencies as 30 days late.
She then received a voicemail saying that she had an urgent matter on her account so she looked and realized what had happened. She then paid off the late fees and the 20 cents and actually had a zero balance and hadn’t charged anything else on the card.
Well because this was her first card and she had a limited credit history, this 20 cents that she missed that was reported as 1 month 30 days late took her credit score down 86 points.
She is trying to qualify for a mortgage and this only negative mark on her credit report caused her credit score to go down below what is acceptable for a mortgage.
So she tried sending a letter explaining what happened, apologizing, owning up to her mistake, and promising that she would be more careful in the future, and requesting that they take the negative mark off her credit report.
She got a letter back a few weeks later telling her that after review they decided that they cannot remove the late report on her credit report.
All because of 20 cents.
Does anyone here have a suggestion for her to try?
It’s horrible to think she will lose out on buying a house over 20 cents.
submitted by /u/krittengirl
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As unfortunate as this is, the financial institutions are required to report accurately. Even though it is only 20 cents… she still didn’t pay it on time. In my experience, the best bet is for her to dispute it directly with the credit bureaus and even then, they probably can’t adjust it.