Who Needs a Credit Expert Witness?
You’d be surprised. We live in an age when one’s FICO score is as important as one’s genetic heritage. Perhaps even more so, since when it comes to creditworthiness, any deviance from the norm can have devastating consequences. A low credit score—the result of late or missed payments and credit reporting mistakes—can cost an individual hundreds of thousands of dollars over his or her lifetime.
One of a relatively small handful of professionals who have mastered the minutiae of the nation’s credit laws, Valerie Van de Zilver is the litigation support specialist, expert witness and forensic consultant that top law firms call to testify on their clients’ behalf.
Experienced litigators know that mistakes in credit reporting, the result of negligence or human error, can be especially harmful—and especially hard to correct. In fact, sanitizing a credit report without expert assistance is about as easy as removing a tattoo without surgery. Which is why so many legal professionals turn to Valerie Van de Zilver.
With three giant credit bureaus—Experian, Equifax and TransUnion—scrambling to calibrate the credit scores of 200 million consumers based on trillions of transactions, mistakes are bound to occur. And when they do, they hurt people financially.
To better understand this, consider a hypothetical example of two demographically and statistically similar individuals, perfectly matched in everything but their credit scores, who are looking to buy a $625,000 Orange County condominium.
They both have the $125,000 required to make a 20% down payment, but they get offered very different interest rates when they apply for a $500,000 mortgage. One borrower secures a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage at 5%, while the other borrower is offered a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage at 7.5%, take it or leave it.
The first borrower has a $2,684.11 monthly mortgage payment, while the second borrower is saddled with a payment of $3,496.07 a month. That’s an appreciable difference of $811.96 a month, $9,743.52 a year, and an eye-popping $292,305.60 over the life of the loan. Ouch.
Of all the capricious punishments meted out to unsuspecting people, the financial fallout from a low credit score ranks right up there with the most severe. Because the ripple effects of a bad credit score extends beyond housing to just about every aspect of an individual’s life, with credit card interest rates relentlessly ratcheted up to rates approaching usury. And that’s bad news for consumers in a recession-roiled market.
Given the stakes involved—and the fact that a significant number of lowered scores can be attributed to mistakes in reporting—is it any wonder that lawsuits over credit disputes are expected to top 10,000 in 2010? The perceived arbitrariness of the credit-scoring system makes people mad enough to want to sue.
Trouble is, our singularly opaque credit laws—famed for their Talmudic subtlety—can leave even legal scholars scratching their heads. That’s why so many litigators in Orange County and the Greater Los Angeles area have Credit Expert Witness Valerie Van de Zilver’s mobile number on speed dial. Maybe you should, too.