Almost everything you read online about credit repair is information that has been written by credit repair companies that want to repair your credit for you for a fee. They may publish useful information, but they have a vested interest in completely over-complicating the topic. They want the average American consumer to throw up their hands and utterly despair of ever getting their credit fixed in any simple or inexpensive manner. Good credit is required to get a home mortgage, loans on automobiles, credit cards and more. Removing the negative credit and repairing your credit report can make your financial life much easier. If you have ever been turned down for a loan or even insurance that you needed very badly then you need to know whats involved in fixing your credit and doing credit repair. Everything a credit repair clinic can do for you, you can do for yourself at little or no cost. While no one can legally remove accurate negative information from a credit report, it is perfectly legal to challenge ANYTHING on your credit report. The law does allow you to request an investigation of information in your file that you dispute as inaccurate or incomplete. There is no charge for requesting an investigation. The whole key to the credit repair procedure is that if the credit bureaus cannot verify information on your credit report they must remove it. For instance, if a credit bureau cannot contact a collection agency which is reporting a collection on your report, they cannot verify the information, and the credit bureau must delete the entry.
The First Step to credit repair is to find out exactly why your FICO scores are low. The only way that you can do this is to Order a report from each of the three main credit-reporting bureaus, Experian, TransUnion and Equifax. You have the option to receive a free credit report from each one time per year, however, you may want to save time and get a tri-merged report that contains all three reports as well as your credit score.and review it for errors and negative information that will cause your credit scores to drop. Errors on your report are accounts that have information that is not accurate. It could be that a late payment is recorded when there never was a late payment, or even the limit is showing wrong and the report thinks that your balance is way over your limit. Derogatory information is information that is negative in nature and true. This information is often late payments, charged of accounts, collections, judgments and bankruptcies. Make sure that you list these accounts so that the oldest account is listed first and the newest is listed last. There are some debts that may have passed the Statute of Limitations for your state. If they have passed the statute of limitations you need to dispute them and have them removed.
Next You will need to write a credit dispute letter to each credit bureau that is reporting negative information on this account. This is important because there are three bureaus and they all report differently so you want to make sure that you are not sending a dispute letter to a bureau that is not reporting negatively about you! A Credit Dispute Letter is basically telling the bureaus that you do not agree with the information they are reporting. The credit dispute letter that you are writing should have your account number, your name, address and social security number. You also need to state the reason you do not agree with the account information. A simple Google search will turn up an abundance of free credit dispute letters. You can also Download free credit repair software that will allow you to create the credit dispute letters using a free, credit repair software. This makes your life a lot easier because it will save you the trouble of having to actually write out the letters or find templates. Once you have your dispute letters send them certified mail to the credit bereaus. Once your letter is received the bureaus under Federal Law must investigate this information with the original lender. If the original lender does not or will not provide proof of the information then the bureaus must remove the item. Once the negative item is removed from your report your scores should increase and your credit should be fixed a little bit. You need to be patient because the credit report companies are going to look into your dispute and see what the original account issuer has to say. If they don't respond or can't provide proper documentation to back up the listed information, the bureaus have to remove the information under Federal Law, this is going to take roughly 30 - 45 days per cycle. The key to getting the job done is to be sure that you utilize the correct letter and format it correctly so take some time and you have the ability to fix terrible credit fast by yourself.
If your reports come back verified, you may have to send out a debt verification letter to the original creditor to verify that the loan if still valid and belongs to you or a debt validation to a collection agency, which validates their right to collect the debt. If you have just a few late payments on an otherwise upstanding account, you may need to send out a “goodwill” letter that explains your temporary lapse of how you made the mistake of being late but that you are now back on your feet and will never allow it to happen again. Many times these explanations can be added to your report and they can be helpful with creditors. remember the credit bureaus are not always very cooperative. They make their money by providing credit reports to lenders not by fixing bad information in their databases. When repairing your credit some items have a stronger effect on your credit score such as Bankruptcy, Foreclosure, Reposession, Loan Default, Court Judgements, Collections, Past Due Payments, Late Payments, Credit Rejections and Credit Inquires. If any of the following items you were not notified that the creditor placed these items on your credit report, you should remind them that they are in violation of the Fair Credit Reporting Act. There are the Federal laws: FCRA- the Fair Credit Reporting Act. FDCPA-the Fair Debt Collections Practices Act. FCBA-the Fair Credit Billing Act and others. All of the Federal laws are enforced by the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission. There are also individual state laws that govern credit reporting and debt collection.
