Capital One's Re-aging

[mom2three]

Does anyone have any knowledge of Capital One's re-aging policy? How easily do they do this and what are their requirments?

 

Thanks!

[Puppeteer]

They do it all the time and it's not legal. There is one and only one DOFD, for example, and it cannot change, but Cap One likes to get creative.

[mom2three]

It's my understanding that re-aging to the positive for the consumer if the account is over 9 months old and that the minimum payment has been made for the last 3 months. Is this not correct?

[Puppeteer]

Ah...I took re-aging to mean something different..it usually means changing a date on your report to one more recent hence extending the date the TL will drop off.

[mom2three]

I found this description on a personal finance board:

 

Re-aging Accounts: A process where a creditor can roll-back an account record with the credit bureaus. This is commonly used when cardholders request that late payment records are removed because they are incorrect or resulting from a special circumstance. However, re-aging can also be used illegally by collections agencies to make a debt account appear much younger than it actually is. Some collections agencies use this tactic to keep an account from expiring from your credit report in order to try to get you to pay the debt.

[DiggingOut]

The word "re-aging" is used in relation to credit in two completely separate ways.

 

A creditor, at any given point, classifies each account as current or as past due (delinquent). Re-aging means reclassifying an account which has been past due to a current status.

 

Example: John Smith's credit card is 120 days past due. The minimum payment due now is $400. Every month that it goes unpaid, it accrues a late fee (in addition to its monthly interest charges) and also is reported another 30 days late, thus making both the total amount owing and the credit report worse and worse.

 

John and the creditor make a payment arrangement which they both accept, that John will pay $100 per month, which is less than the billed minimum payment due, and not use the account again for a period of several months. Then after three on-time $100 payments as agreed, the creditor will bring John's account current even though the actual minimum payment as billed still hasn't been fully satisfied. John benefits because once the account is brought current by the creditor the late fees will stop. Also, once the account is brought current, it will afterward no longer be reporting to the CRA's as past due. However, if John blows off the payment arrangement and fails to make his $100 payments as agreed, the creditor will not re-age the account in John's favor as they would otherwise have done.

 

To the OP mom2three -- talk to CapOne to ask about re-aging. It's an individual agreement and payment arrangement. Don't make any assumptions that by x number of months of payments, that beneficial re-aging will just happen on its own. You AND CapOne both have to participate in making that kind of agreement. Ask for it -- the worst that will happen is that they'll say no. If you don't ask and haven't previous made that specific agreement with CapOne, it won't happen -- so why not ask and at least try to get it?

 

 

The other use of the word "re-aging" is negative. When a creditor reports dates on an account which make it falsely appear to be more recent than it truly is, the seven year reporting period for CRA's to age off derogatory information gets wrongly reset to a longer period than it ought to be.

 

(BTW, just as a comment -- we don't often have a reason to like this kind of re-aging but once in a while it actually turns out to be a benefit if it's on a positive account. A fitness club membership contract which I had paid off in the late 80's reappeared on my CR's in 2003 with a zero balance but a reported date of 2003. I don't know the specific circumstances for that particular fitness chain but I do know that, for example, sometimes when a business upgrades or migrates their business records into a newer system they will simply make a one-time positive update to the CRA's rather than retain the actual very old specific dates which applied to that tradeline from years earlier. If a CRA has already aged off the old tradeline earlier, that kind of report doesn't usually cause the CRA to "add" the TL back onto the CR but if the TL still exists for that CRA, it will report the update. Experian often lets a positive TL run far past the 10-year minimum reporting period and thus still had the fitness contract TL, thus a positive TL will now stick around giving me some nice extra age on my Experian CR until 2013 when in actuality that TL would normally have been long gone already after the late 1990's.