Late credit card payment question!

kandb

DIS Veteran
Joined
Apr 22, 2006
I have never been late on a credit card payment, pay the balances off every month. Somehow, my Kohl's charge was changed to "paperless" and we never received a mailed bill last month. I called and they waived the late fee, I paid off the current balance in full and they changed it back to mailing the bills out. I got an "alert" about my credit card rating. It went down 100 points :headache: because of this. Is there anyway I can get this negative late payment off my credit report? Can Kohl's help with this. I looked back and don't even see where they sent me an email about the payment that was late.
 
This would be entirely on Capital One, which is the bank that issues Kohl's cards. They don't have any legal obligation for removing it if you were in fact 30+ days late with the payment. What you are looking for is a goodwill removal of the late payment from your credit report. It looks like Capital One is willing to do this if you work with them. If they won't, you will start getting some of those points back in two months as long as you don't have any other negatives and in two years you score will completely rebound, although the actual late will stay on your report for 7.
 


It can be, it depends on the overall file and where the OP is getting the score from. If it is Credit Karma or Capital One Credit Journey, they use an open source method that doesn't even come close to actual credit scores that the banks look at. My Credit Karma score is over 100 points lower than my actual FICO credit scores. If OP has a relatively short history and not many cards it could drop FICO that much, the percentage of on-time payments is the single biggest factor in credit scores.
 
For one late payment? That doesn’t seem right.

It's definitely the only negative thing on my credit report for 40 years. I even got alerts from the 2 different credit bureaus notifying me of the reduction and they both listed Kohl's as the reason and it was a drop of 99 points.

I also have my checking account and a few CD's with Capitol One, so I am hoping that helps when I try to fight it.

My credit score went from Exceptional to Good!

I just looked on credit karma again, my transunion score actually went down 103 points.
 
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It's definitely the only negative thing on my credit report for 40 years. I even got alerts from the 2 different credit bureaus notifying me of the reduction and they both listed Kohl's as the reason and it was a drop of 99 points.

I also have my checking account and a few CD's with Capitol One, so I am hoping that helps when I try to fight it.

My credit score went from Exceptional to Good!
If you make the call being adversarial, they are much less likely to want to help you. You aren't fighting it, you are trying to get them to do you a favor as a good customer that they want to keep. Technically according to their agreements with the credit bureaus, they aren't supposed to do exactly what you are asking them to do. Be contrite, and tell them exactly what happened, I don't think you'll have too much trouble getting it taken care of, it might take six months to do so though.
 


If you make the call being adversarial, they are much less likely to want to help you. You aren't fighting it, you are trying to get them to do you a favor as a good customer that they want to keep. Technically according to their agreements with the credit bureaus, they aren't supposed to do exactly what you are asking them to do. Be contrite, and tell them exactly what happened, I don't think you'll have too much trouble getting it taken care of, it might take six months to do so though.

I appreciate the advice. I didn't really mean to fight it, more then to challenge it but I totally get what you are saying. The agent I called originally was super nice and accommodating but at that point I did not know it would affect my credit rating.
 
100 point drop for one late payment seems excessive. Several years ago there was a processing error with my student loan payment (one payment, but posts to 12, yes 12, loans). That one payment, over 12 loans dropped my score 155 points
 
Ugh. I’m so sorry this happened to you.
I had a similar situation a few years ago with kohl’s. I had it set to autopay and I got a late notice in the mail. I immediately called and the rep took off the late payment. I asked how this could happen when I had it on autopay and she said it is their policy to remove the autopay feature if the card hasn’t been used a lot.

Um..what is a lot? She couldn’t answer that.

Luckily I got the notice before it hit my credit report. I did google the situation and there is a ton of horror stories about Kohls doing this.

Now, I very rarely use my Kohls card unless it is because I have to to get 30% off and set an alarm for a week later to pay it off when it posts.
 
Do you have a large purchase coming up (house, car)? If not, don't give it a second thought.
Do you have a large purchase coming up (house, car)? If not, don't give it a second thought.

No, but I get credit cards often for their bonuses and usually have no trouble getting approved. I don't want that to be affected.
 
Ugh. I’m so sorry this happened to you.
I had a similar situation a few years ago with kohl’s. I had it set to autopay and I got a late notice in the mail. I immediately called and the rep took off the late payment. I asked how this could happen when I had it on autopay and she said it is their policy to remove the autopay feature if the card hasn’t been used a lot.

Um..what is a lot? She couldn’t answer that.

Luckily I got the notice before it hit my credit report. I did google the situation and there is a ton of horror stories about Kohls doing this.

Now, I very rarely use my Kohls card unless it is because I have to to get 30% off and set an alarm for a week later to pay it off when it posts.

Thanks. It really aggravates me because I check my emails a few times a day. If I ever saw an email about a charge card being due, I would of called them realizing they didn't mail it to me. I also did a search for Kohl's on my emails and there was just the recent one and one from 2018 about a free $5. I will call them tomorrow. Our credit card bills are several thousand dollars a month and this "past due bill" was for $22.
 
I had a strange incident with my Kohls bill from September - it arrived in the mail on the exact same day as my October bill. The October bill showed that I had not paid the September bill and charged me a late fee. It was very odd and I did have to argue with the rep on the phone about paying the late fee. My mom's September Kohl's bill arrived 2 days before the payment was due so I am wondering if there was something going on with their billing for that month.
 
Wow. Maybe. I got the first email saying I had a payment due on 12/1, then 2 days later I had an email saying I had a $22 late payment. Definitely NO emails before this. Plus we never go paperless. My husband pays our bills every month and we never opt for paperless and we pay the bills in full as soon as we get them.
 
I just checked my kohl’s account in a panic thinking I had done the same thing! Thankfully it looks like nothing is due till 12/6.

I just opened the account a few months ago and am not used to having it yet!

OP, I hope you get this all worked out!!
 
I had this same problem back in 2007 with Kohl's. I was able to get them to remove the late charge and interest but I was never able to get my credit report corrected. It affected my credit for 7 years - every time we bought a house, refi'ed, bought a car - I had to write a letter explaining what happened. It makes my blood boil just thinking about it. I didn't churn cc's back then in the way I do now so not sure if would have affected my ability to get cards.
 
I had this same problem back in 2007 with Kohl's. I was able to get them to remove the late charge and interest but I was never able to get my credit report corrected. It affected my credit for 7 years - every time we bought a house, refi'ed, bought a car - I had to write a letter explaining what happened. It makes my blood boil just thinking about it. I didn't churn cc's back then in the way I do now so not sure if would have affected my ability to get cards.

If you were in fact 30 days late then your credit report was correct.
 

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