Do creditors bother to read the 100-word statement?
The Fair Credit Reporting Act gives consumers the right to add a brief statement to their credit reports explaining disputed items. Our experience has shown, however, that these statements are at best unhelpful, and at worst, damaging. Many misinformed credit experts suggest using this statement to explain your side of the story when a negative item on your credit reports is lowering your credit score. Unfortunately, because human eyes rarely read through the details of your credit reports, this explanation most likely will have zero effect on a creditor’s opinion of your creditworthiness. Even worse, when you add a statement on your credit reports such as “these payments were only late because there was a problem with the company’s automatic withdrawal system”, it can be interpreted as an admission of guilt. If you try to dispute the item in the future, the credit bureaus will not need to bother contacting the credit grantor to determine the accuracy of the negative item because your
