Usually it’s about the time that someone needs to buy a new car or is about to purchase their first home that they realize that they are going to need to do a little bad credit report repair. While it can be quite costly to hire a professional to help you get your credit rating back on track quickly, there is hope for people who are the more do-it-yourself type and want to save some money.

Bad credit report repair can be done on your own if you have the time and some organizational skills. It is not difficult work to fix your credit, it is just a matter of understanding exactly what makes up your credit score, identifying the problem areas, and then workings swiftly to resolve those issues. All of this can easily be done on your own, without the help of an expensive professional.

The first thing that you need to do is order a copy of your credit report from each of the three credit bureaus, Experian, Equifax and Trans Union. You can order a copy from each of the three agencies for free every 12 months, and it only takes a minute. Just go to the Annual Credit Report website, enter in your contact information, and you’ll instantly have an electronic copy of your report, which you can save to your hard drive and print out. Just be sure to visit the official Free Credit Report website, as there are many other that suggest you can receive a free report, but only if you sign up for a trial of their monthly credit monitoring service. The official site, however, has no strings attached.

Once you have downloaded your report, print if off and take out two different color pens or highlighters. You are looking for two things that you want to distinguish from each other. The first thing you are looking for is errors on your report. One in four credit documents include misinformation, so chances are you will find some. The other thing you are looking for, which you want to highlight in a different color, is the accurate information that is negatively affecting your credit score. Each report will be slightly different, so thoroughly and carefully look at each document.

Once you have done that, the next in your bad credit report repair plan is to remove the false information and eliminate the negative information. To do this, make two columns on a sheet of paper that that are labeled, “misinformation” and “negative information.” List your items in the appropriate column, but rank them in terms of their greatest impact on your credit score. For example, if you have a bankruptcy on your credit report that did not occur and a typo in your employer’s address, you want to list the bankruptcy first since having that removed will have the greatest impact on your credit score.

Once you have your items ranked in the proper order, you will have an idea of where you need to focus your energy to improve your credit score the fastest. When disputing items on your credit report, you don’t want to do them all at once. Just take care of the biggest problems first in order to get the most cooperation from the credit bureaus and getting them to act fast.

By: Ryan J. Taylor