If you’re being turned down for credit left and right by every mortgage broker, credit card company, and landlord, or you’re not even able to refinance your own house, that is an indication that you have some negative items on your credit report that are scaring away lenders. You have two choices: You can either walk away and decide to wait out the next seven years until those negative items drop off your credit report, or you can take control over the situation and learn how to delete negative items from your credit report.

You may have seen those advertisements where those law firms or credit counseling companies promise to fix your credit, raise your FICO score, and get you a fresh start. How do you delete negative items from your credit report? The answer is based on a law passed by Congress in the latter half of the twentieth century known as the Fair Credit Reporting Act. This law was passed to protect consumer’s rights to access their credit report and play an active role in ensuring that it does not contain any inaccuracies or misrepresentations of your true credit profile.

If you have derogatory information contained in any of the credit reports issued by the “big three” credit bureau, you simply need to write a letter to each respective creditor disputing the accuracy of that particular entry in your credit report. By law, then the bureau must contact the creditor to verify that specific item that is in dispute. And here is where the law works in your favor: If the bureau is unable to verify the accuracy of the information within 30 days, they are required to delete that item from your credit report altogether!

Here is an example of how you would do this: Let’s say that you were late for your mortgage payment in May of last year, you simply write a letter to the credit bureau that is reporting that late payment, detailing that entry, and including your name, address, and social security number, in which you state that in accordance with the Fair Credit Reporting Act, you are disputing such and such entry as you believe it may be inaccurate. And in this letter, you must state that, in accordance with the Act, if the agency does not verify this information within 30 days, then they are required to delete the information from your credit report.

Now what if the bureau is able to contact the creditor and verify the information within the 30-day timeframe? Well, then the information stays on your credit report. What if the creditor is a little slow but gets back to the bureau within 45 days? Then yes, even though the bureau deleted the item after 30 days, the information can be added back in the subsequent month. But through patience and persistence, if you follow this method, you will eventually be able to improve your credit score. There is no 100% guarantee, however, which is why shouldn’t pay anyone to fix your credit for you, unless they offer a money back-guarantee if your credit score doesn’t improve within a specific period of time.

A couple of bits of advice: Write one separate letter to each bureau for each disputed item. For example, if you have five derogatory items on your report, that were reported to all three bureaus, then you should write fifteen letters. This way you can track the progress of each dispute, plus it guarantees that the credit agency will pay individual attention to each one. Give them more paperwork to process and they will be that much more backlogged to meet their thirty-day deadline.

And one final bit of advice: The Fair Credit Reporting Act also allows the bureaus to disregard your dispute if it s frivolous in nature. In other words, if you do something to cause them to suspect that you are just filing disputes that you know are more than likely to be accurate, just for the sake of flooding them with requests, then they can disregard your inquiry and not take it seriously. Therefore, be careful not to do things like repeatedly dispute the same item over and over again if it keeps on getting verified. The law was passed to protect the legitimate needs of consumers against credit fraud or data entry errors.

By: Hyder Khan