Did your deferral agreement say they wouldn’t report? It wouldn’t be unreasonable to me (Albeit inconvenient for you) if they offered a deferral, that they report it late until you pay the balance, and then update it to paid on-time.
I don’t remember many (any?) deferrals in 2008-2009. HAMP and all the modification agreements had something on reporting paid on time once executed (I’d have to dig mine out), but there weren’t any wide-scale deferral programs like this time around.
I agreed to the contract that said BMWFS would report the delayed payments as an on time payment. However if I don’t pay the delayed payments at the end of lease, those could be reported as late or delinquent.
Always. Get. It. In. Writing. Works for pretty much anything, including child custody agreements.
While I’m still obsessing about this and waiting on the credit dispute results, I found this on an article (it explains why my Vantage Score was not affected, only FICO)
So they/BMWFS basically added that special code but still reported a late payment; I expect many if not most of the customers using the deferral have the same issue…
My industry was effected heavily by this pandemic and I opted to utilize the deferral since my income was deeply impacted. They assured me that nothing would be reported to the credit bureaus and that it would show as if these payment had been made. I was quite disappointed to see that they added a note on my credit file “affected by natural disaster” and plan to call them about it as my agreement with them was that nothing would be reported. After seeing this post I got even more concerned so I checked my full credit report. At this point everything shows as paid as agreed and on time payments but I plan to monitor closely.
I would suspect that if this does become a thing and they don’t fix the issue for people that there will be some sort of class action against them for this. As someone who has an 840+ credit score, I take this very seriously. I’m not a litigious person but if their actions cause something I have worked very hard to maintain get messed up, then I would be more inclined to jump on some sort of lawsuit. 2 car payments isn’t worth that kind of credit damage especially when you still owe them the payments at some point.
Also for anyone going through this, equifax now offers 6 free full credit reports a year on top of your annual free credit report from all agencies.
I’ll report back if anything pops up on my report or if BMW FS removes this remark.
Please please please please please don’t use third-party apps to dispute info in your credit file.
When you’re looking at Credit Karma and its ilk you are not looking at your full credit report. You’re looking at portions of it sent by the bureaus in raw data format to CK, who then maps a subset of what they receive into their GUI.
For something as important as a credit bureau dispute, you don’t want to use a third party’s partial interpretation of what’s reporting.
Secondarily, CK only shows you interpreted portions of two of your four files. It doesn’t even show you parts of what’s on the other two.
Plenty of people will post anecdotes of how this worked just fine for them. You need to be concerned about how difficult it gets to fix something when the first half-assed attempt fails.
I agree is better to dispute to each bureau separately. I still think it was an IT related mistake, like automated reporting before they processed the deferred payments. Will keep you posted on the results.
I’m not sure there is a benefit of having a score over say a 750 when it comes to most things but I do know that anything over 800+ (Highest level for FICO) pretty much automatically gives you access to the lowest rates.
Also my point on stating my score was just to show that I’ve played the game over the years and take the score seriously. Sometimes you have to leave balances and pay them off even when you could just buy the darn thing and not pay interest so it’s cost me money to get to a high score. It’s all a game but it’s a game you have to play unfortunately.
Lastly just to be clear…not trying to tell anyone what to do with their credit or give advise, I’m just stating why BMW messing up my scores will really piss me off.
