This happens with larger unsecured debts. It will give the debt collector up to 20 years to collect payment. This is beyond the 7 year statue of limitations that applies to all other debts.

It has become common for debt collectors to renew their judgments against the debtor. This will give the debt collector another 20 years to try and recover payment on the debt.

Judgments will hurt your credit score. You should also know that if you pay a judgment it will not be deleted from your credit report.

When a judgment is paid it changes the listing to satisfied judgment. A satisfied judgment is still a derogatory listing and will still hurt your credit score.

In order to delete a judgment you should dispute it. This means you are saying the judgment is inaccurate or invalid.

You dispute the judgment directly with the credit bureaus. This is done by writing a dispute letter to the credit bureaus.

When you dispute a judgment if it is not verified then it will be removed by the credit bureaus. It has been found that when negative listings are investigated they are often removed regardless of accuracy.

This happens because it costs the debt collectors money to verify a listing. Typically debt collectors do not want to spend money verifying listings.

The difficult part is to get the credit bureaus to investigate a disputed listing. This is a result of the investigation costing the credit bureaus money that would otherwise be profit.

This is why some people have hired professional credit repair companies to dispute negative listings on their behalf.