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My credit score dropped 63 points and it was one silly mistake I made at the dentist | Credit Advice - Thought Shares

My credit score dropped 63 points and it was one silly mistake I made at the dentist

So I finally got my score up to 741 back in March, which felt huge for me since I was sitting at like 580 just a few years back. Then I go to the dentist for a cleaning and they say I owe $214 after insurance, and I pay it right there with my card. Fast forward six weeks and I get a call from a collections place saying I never paid them. Turns out the dentist office sent the bill to a collection agency by mistake and nobody bothered to call me first. My score tanked 63 points overnight, down to 678, and I nearly lost my mind because I was about to co-sign a car loan for my daughter. I called the dentist office three times and finally got the office manager to admit they coded the payment wrong in their system. She said she would send a letter to the collection agency to remove it, but that took almost 40 days to actually clear off my report. I pulled all three reports myself to make sure it came off everywhere, because I don't trust anyone to do that part for me. Has anyone else had a medical or dental office send you to collections over their own billing screwup, and how long did it take to fix your score after?

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lunathompson5d ago

Something very similar happened to my wife with a lab bill a couple years back. What saved us was calling the collection agency directly after we got the letter from the dentist's office, because they can sometimes flag the account as "disputed" while it's pending removal, and that stops it from hurting you more in the meantime. Also pull your reports from annualcreditreport.com, the free one, not the paid sites, and file a dispute with each bureau yourself once you have that letter in hand. Keep a paper copy of everything, dates, names, who you talked to. In our case the score bounced back within about two weeks after it came off, but the hit itself stayed on the report as a note for a while. Your mileage may vary by bureau though, they don't all move at the same speed.