Credit Repair Basics

Where the Heck do I Start?

Diving into the world of credit repair can be overwhelming to say the least.

In the beginning it's almost like learning a foreign language.

There is a wealth of information out there and at first its going to be hard to decipher much of anything.

Disputing 

Disputing is your main tool for credit repair.

Disputes are basically going to fall into two categories:

1.) Disputing through the CRAs (Credit Reporting Agencies)


2.) Disputing with the CAs (Collection Agencies)

Two common forms of disputes are requesting verification and requesting validation

1.) Verification: Consumers have the right to challenge any of the information on their credit report.

2.) Validation: Consumers also have the right to ask the collection agency to provide some form of documentation that said debt is truely yours.

CA's validate, they don't verify. CRA's verify, they don't validate.

Removing Old Addresses

Before you ever start firing off disputes one of the first steps to undergo is removing any and all previous addresses from your credit report. This will help your credit repair efforts immensely, particularly if your negative reporting is associated with these old addresses.

Basically, here's why: Anything negative on your credit report is going to have some basic information associated with it such as your name, your social security number, your account number and your address.

If you were to dispute a negative report and all of the information matches exactly, then it is obviously pretty simple for the CRA or the CA to verify.

When some of this information does not match (like your address) then the software is going to recognize this discrepancy, and attempt to go to the original source of information to verify.

Basically what this does is make it harder on the CRA or CA to verify, and that's kind of what the game is all about. If the CRA or CA has to spend extra time or money to verify a negative report they are more likely to drop the ball.

Your negative report must be deleted if any of the following occur:
1.) There is no response to your request
2.) Your request is not responded to within 30 days

So if you can make it more difficult to verify your dispute, and the CRA or CA does not wish to expend the extra time or money verifying your dispute, then you are in the clear!

Often all it takes is a simple phone call to each of the CRA's to have an old invalid address removed.

Avoid Credit Repair Companies

While hiring a credit repair service definitely can save you some time the fact is that by law, anything a credit repair service can legally accomplish for you, you could also do yourself for the cost of some postage.

While you are trying to repair your credit what you will mostly be doing, besides learning about all this stuff, is writing a ton of letters to both the credit reporting agencies and the collection agencies.

How to Fix Your Credit Yourself

If you are like the millions of other Americans with bad credit you have probably done at least a couple of searches online for ways to repair your credit. Any kind of Internet search regarding ways to fix your credit or rebuild your credit maybe even after bankruptcy are guaranteed to turn up an almost countless number of credit repair services. You need to be warned that a lot of credit repair services you may find are essentially scams. Claims that sound too good to be true like guarantees to erase your bad credit or ways to create a new credit identity are very likely to be indicators of a credit repair scam. It is a legal and essentially impossible for you or anyone else to remove accurate negative information from the credit bureaus records. So if you run into any sort of credit repair company making these sorts of claims it should raise some intermediate red flags.

It seems like these days there are more and more people in need of credit repair services. But a little education can go a long way in making the right choices to repair your credit. Any time you search on Google for ways to repair your credit you are going to return thousands and thousands of results. Most of which will probably be companies offering to fix your credit for you for price.