There are many people in our country today with bad credit that don’t even know it. In fact, most of these people won’t even find out until they apply for credit and are denied.
Will you be next?
Whether you know you have bad credit or not, there are steps you can take to make sure your credit is moving in the right direction.
Order a copy of your credit report. By law, you are allowed one free copy of your credit report from each of the three major credit bureaus per year. Make sure you that advantage of this. Either order all three at once to get a complete picture of your credit or stagger them throughout the year to keep an up to date picture. Review your reports with a fine tooth comb. Make sure to take your time and pay attention to every detail. Check your personal information for misspelling and wrong numbers or addresses. Review your credit accounts for proper dates and amounts. Make sure you recognize all the accounts listed on your report. Identity theft is a growing problem, don’t be a victim. And take a look at who else has been looking at your credit report. Dispute information that doesn’t belong there. While going through your reports, make a detailed list of all the information that is wrong or items that should no longer be there. Keep a copy of this list for yourself and send a copy of it, along with your credit report, to the corresponding credit bureau. Then all you can do is wait. A credit bureau is required by law to investigate all disputes and reply within thirty days. If any changes are made, they should send you an updated copy of your credit report. File a dispute with the creditor. If you know the information is wrong and the credit bureau investigation did not change anything, file a dispute with the creditor that listed the item. The process should be similar to filing a dispute with the credit bureau.
Remember, it’s your credit. It’s up to you to fix it.
By: K.M. Aguglia
Posts Tagged ‘Credit Help’
Negative Credit Repair Help
February 4th, 2010Can A Credit Repair Agency Really Help?
January 14th, 2010
The purpose of a credit repair agency is to help those whose debt burden has gotten out of control to take charge of their financial lives and to improve their credit scores. But even the best credit assistance agencies cannot remove the stigma of years of missed or delayed payments, unless you can prove that the problems were justified.
The only items which are ever permanently removed from a person’s credit history are a personal bankruptcy, which remains for ten years, and any debts which your creditors have written off. But fixing your credit report is definitely doable. There are even some credit fixing agencies which promise that, for enough money, they can reward you with a pristine credit history, but if you had that kind of money, you probably wouldn’t need to have your credit history repaired!
The truth is that while you as an individual can repair errors on your payment history like incorrect payments or personal information like your name, age, address, gender, or marital status, if you supply documentation, no one has the power to eradicate a history of missed or late payments.
If you want to have something personal on your credit history changes, simply write to the reporting agency with your documentation, which they will check. If they have made a mistake, they will repair it and you can see the change the next time you request your credit report.
What A Credit Repair Agency Can And Can’t Do
The only thing a credit help agency can do to repair your credit history is to do the same thing: send your documentation to the credit reporting agency to correct a mistake. If a credit score repair agency leads you to believe they can completely eradicate your poor credit record, they are not being honest. And while some companies will take advantage of a legislative loophole to add good credit to your history of poor credit, that could change at any time.
Do not go looking for a credit repair agency if you want anything more than a mistake in your personal information corrected on your credit history. If you pay for anything more than that you are throwing your money away, and you don’t even need outside agency help to fix most of the inaccurate information on your report. If you review your credit history onece each year, you can correct any inaccuracies yourself.
If you notice, in reviewing your credit history, that some of your financial transactions are missing, it is nothing to become alarmed about. Not all the companies with which you do business report to the credit agencies, even though their failure to report transactions could make it hard for their customers to establish credit histories. But no agency can persuade them to add transactions to credit reports if it is against their policies to do so.
As long as you use your credit responsibly, and keep on top of your credit history report by reviewing it once a year for errors, you might very well go through life without ever having to think of using a any type of credit score help agency!
By: Wade Robins
Credit Repair Attorneys – 3 Reasons You Should Use One to Repair Your Credit
December 22nd, 2009
It’s a shame that some people feel credit repair attorneys are all a scam. In truth if these people have judgments against them, charge offs on their credit report, or possibly repossessions a credit repair attorney could do wonders for them. If you’re still one of those people that has an open mind out hiring a professional to handle your credit repair read on. This article is going to offer 3 reasons you should consider hiring a credit repair attorney.
1.) How bad is your credit report? If you aren’t suffering from a horrible credit score or anything more then a couple of bad accounts on your credit report you probably don’t need a credit repair attorneys help. It’s for those of you that have charge offs, multiple collection accounts, and other public records such as judgements, foreclosures, repossessions, and bankruptcies that should seek out the help of a credit repair attorney.
If this sounds like you then there is a huge benefit to hiring a professional to help repair your poor credit score.
2.) Experience: I believe to many people focus on the cost of hiring a credit repair lawyer rather then looking at the benefits they offer. Of those the number one benefit is their experience. Consider this, if you’re to repair your own credit this is your first crack at it. You don’t know what to watch out for, what to not challenge or dispute.
In contrast most credit repair attorneys have handled hundreds if not thousands of clients. There fore they have a lot of experience to draw on when deciding how to handle your credit repair case. This is something you or I just do not have when trying to manage it ourselves.
3.) How much time do you have? Depending on your current situation maybe you have three years to repair your credit. How ever if you’re trying to make a big change in a year or less you’re going to need all the help you can get.
Hiring a credit repair attorney won’t expedite the time it takes for disputes to be resolved, but it will give you more options to repair your credit. Using other legal avenues some attorneys will go directly after creditors, collection agencies and the credit bureaus. It provides more fire power for your credit repair campaign, and can yield faster results then attempting to do it on your own.
In closing, if you’re going to seek the assistance of a credit repair attorney I suggest considering one of the many online companies offering credit repair services. If you are going to find someone local be sure to check them out with your local better business bureau office. While most credit repair companies are on the up and up it never hurts just to check.
By: Ian Henman
