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Free Credit Repair Guide

YOU CAN DO ANYTHING A CREDIT REPAIR COMPANY CAN DO, AT HOME AND FOR FREE!

A credit score is a statistical way of predicting how likely it is that you will pay back a loan, such as a mortgage, that might be made to you.

CAN I REALLY FIX MY CREDIT?

Of course you can! Many of my former clients, friends, and even yours have cleared up things like foreclosure, late payments, charge offs, and other serious negative items from their creditreports! By the way: everything a credit repair clinic can do for you, you can do for yourself at little or no cost!

If you have not paid your bills on time, begin doing so immediately!

Credit scores emphasize your most recent payment records!

The information provided on these pages will help fix ERRORS on your credit report as well as help clean up those “questionable” items. While no one can legally remove accurate negative information from a credit report, the law does allow you to request a reinvestigation of the information in your file that you dispute as inaccurate or incomplete. On the other hand, it is perfectly legal to challenge ANYTHING on your credit report! There is no charge for requesting an investigation. The whole key to the credit repair procedure is that if the credit bureaus cannot verify the 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!Leave a comment at the bottom if this Free Credit Repair guide has been helpful!

FREE CREDIT REPAIR GUIDE CONTENTS:

BASIC CREDIT REPAIR STRATEGY

The basic strategy to repairing your credit is as follow:

1. Request and review your Free Credit Score Information (you can get a free copy of the report by going to http://www.AnnualCreditReport.com the official FTC sponsored site for free credit reports, and this will allow you to obtain information from all 3 bureaus which is important. 

2. Analyze your credit report

3. Make a list of all the items you consider to be questionable or negative. Clearly identify each item in your report that you dispute, explain why you dispute the information.

4. Write a dispute letter to the bureaus.

5. Send the letter to the credit bureaus. Make sure you send it registered or certified mail for tracking purposes.

6. Document your efforts. Record when you sent your letters, and the results.

7. Wait for the bureaus to investigate your claims.

8. Analyze the results.

9. Was the item delted or changed to your satisfaction? You may continue steps 1, 2, and 3 above until you feel the dispute is settled satisfactorily. Remember, there is no charge for reinvestigation. If you do not get the results you want, dispute the listing again!

Thats all there is to it! Seems easy enough, but you must have patience, because the credit bureaus are not always very cooperative. They make money their money by providing credit reports to lenders, not by fixing bad credit information in their databases.

FOLLOWING ARE DETAILED INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE ABOVE CREDIT REPAIR STEPS:

1. Request a copy of your credit report

Since you have found this site on the internet, I would assume you have some ability in using computers. The easiest and cheapest way to obtain your reports is to navigate to the free and government sponsored site, http://www.AnnualCreditReport.com, where you may obtain a free copy of your credit report from each bureau once per year. Alternatively, you may contact each bureau directly at their appropriate websites, http://www.Transunion.com , www.Experian.com , and www.Equifax.com . If you have been turned down or denied credit the appropriate bureau is also required to give you a free copy of the report used. Be sure to read the details in the denial of credit letter.

2. Analyze your credit report

Review all acounts with outstanding balances and verify payment histories. Be sure to pay extra attention to items reported as “collections, judgements, charge-offs, or liens.” Make a copy of your report and highlight everything you view as a negative listing.

3. Rank questionable/negative items

Now that you have your list, you should rank each item according to the amount of damage they are doing to your overall credit picture.
Rank the most damaging information first, followed by the next, followed by the items which are neutral. Do this for each credit report, and remember, they may not all have the same information on them. They may even have duplicate information. In this case, you will need to write each credit agency individually for each duplicate item.

The items listed here are listed in order of descending importance with the first item being the “most damaging” to your credit:

  • Bankruptcy
  • Foreclosure
  • Repossession
  • Loan Default
  • Court Judgements
  • Charge-offs
  • Collections
  • Past Due Payments
  • Late Payments
  • Credit Rejections
  • Credit Inquiries

4. Requesting corrections and disputing your credit

What should you challenge in your credit dispute?

Everything! You should always shoot for a complete deletion as well. Don’t bother challenging information within a collection listing, charge-off, court record, repossession, foreclosure, or settled account. As the basic nature of these listings is negative, changing the information within the listing will yield no improvement. Severely negative listings, such as thse, must be disputed on the basis of complete deletion or not disputed at all.

5.Make sure that you send everything certified or registered mail

This is important, as you must be able to tell when letters were sent and received. It gives you some leverage with the CRAs (Credit Reporting Authorities) if they do not respond in the time frame required by law.

6. Document your credit repair efforts

As soon as you have ordered your credit reports and photocopied your order letters and checks, you must create a precise organizational system to track your correspondences with the credit bureaus and your creditors. Why is this necessary? Unfortunately, credit items you have worked so hard to remove mysteriously reappear. If this happens, it is usually easy to have the items deleted permanently if you show your complete records on the first removal. Why take a chance? As you proceed through these steps, keep copies and records of all correspondence you send and receive. If you should encounter any special difficulty and would like help in repairing your credit, you will need these records to proceed.

Every time you have a telephone conversation with a creditor, you must document the conversation by recording the name of the person to whome you spoke, his or her position, and the date and time of the conversation, what was said, and what was agreed upon.

7. Wait for the credit bureau to finish investigating

Once the credit reporting agency has received your dispute letter, they are obligated to investigate. This obligation is not contingent upon you having been denied credit. According to the Fair Credit Reporting Act of 1997, the 3 credit bureaus ust take the following steps:

  • The credit reporting agencies must resolve the consumers’ disputes within 30 days
  • In response to consumers’ complaints that documentation in support of their disputes was disregarded, the credit bureaus have to consider and transmit to the furnisher all relevant evidence submitted by the consumer the first time.
  • Consumers will receive written notice of the results of the investigation within 5 (five) days of completion, including an amended credit file.
  • Once information is deleted from a credit file, the credit bureaus can not reinsert it unless the entity supplying the information certifies that the item is complete and accurate and the credit bureau notified the consumer within 5 (five) days.

If the new investigation revleas an error, you may ask that the corrected version of the report be sent to anyone who received your report within the last six months.

8. Evaluate the results of your repair efforts

You did save the original credit report ordered, didn’t you? Good, you will need them to evaluate how well you did. It’s all part of step 5 above, documenting your efforts.

9. Specialized techniques

Depending on the type of listing, you may want to try these separate techniques:

  • Collections- You should always try to dispute the validity of the reporting.
  • Charge-Offs- Try disputing the information within the listing, like the date the account was opened, the high balance, the amount owed, etc. If any of the of the information is incorrect, you have a good chance of getting the entire thing deleted from your report.
  • Judgements- If you were never served for the judgement, you may have a chance of getting it vacated (voided). Call your county courthouse for the information on the judgement serving requirements in your state and how to file a motion to vacate.

THE RESULTS OF EACH ITEM WILL HAVE BEEN RESOLVED IN ONE OF THREE WAYS:

  1. If the listing is not mentioned in the results list, you must have forgotten to include it, or your request was not sufficiently clear. You will need to dispute the item again in your next dispute letter. The bureaus are legally obligated to respond in writing within 30 days, so if they do not, it is highly unlikely they are ignoring you.
  2. The disputed item was investigated and verified. If you do not get the item removed, most likely, thecredit bureaus will have just given you a cryptic reason as to why. Ex. “item verified.” The creditor may ahve responded to the credit bureau’s request for re-verification. They may ahve simply said that the listing was correct, and in this case, the bureau will take their word for it. Now it is up to you to prove to the bureau that the item was not correct. The law requires that the bureaus accept any proof you may submit, as well as to pass any documentation you provide on to your creditor for consideration, so be sure to send any documentation you can, if you didn’t do it the first time. You can also try disputing the listing again at a future time. Who knows, you may get lucky, and a different employee of the creditor may not be able to verify the item.
  3. The disputed listing was investigated as to the correctness of the information within the listing (such as the late pay notations) and the listing was found to be inaccurate or unverifiable. Remember, if the creditor doesn’t respond to the burea at all, this is the same as the listing being unverifiable. in this case, the negative listing will now show up as a positive listing, or it will be deleted from the report all together. This is the best possible outcome.

If you are not getting the desired results from thecredit bureaus, there is the possiblity that your claims were misunderstood, mishandled, or overlooked by the representative. Fixing your credit takes time. Going on your computer and protesting online may expedite the outcome.

TIPS FOR RESUBMITTING YOUR CREDIT REPORT DISPUTES

  1. Be persistent – Become more insistent, but not threatening, with each dispute. As you submit one dispute after another, it may become increasingly difficult to get the checker to initiate the investigation. Your first one or two disputes should be friendly and polite. Just like any other consumer, you can become frustrated and threatening as time passes. You may threaten to hire an attorney. You may threaten to complain to the FTC, etc, but don’t overdo it.
  2. Be creative – Create and utilize other techniques that help further the idea that the dispute letter is from a truly wronged and disadvantaged consumer. The checker is only interested in investigating disputes that truly are erroneous and damaging. The agencies are flooded with requests, and they tend to give priority to those that seem most urgent.
  3. Do not bombard the agencies with disputes (about the same listing, that is). Sending one dispute after another is wasteful and counterproductive. The rule of thumb is to wait 60 days between disputes of the same listing.

WHAT IF A REMOVED NEGATIVE ITEM COMES BACK ON MY CREDIT REPORT?

This is actually becoming more commonplace: since the new credit laws require that the bureaus investigate and resolve your disputes within 30 days, they will sometimes remove the negative information temporarily ntil they receive the information verified as true. Then they will put back any information verified to be true and notify you of this. By law, they can do this, but they have to notify you in writing.

I wish you the best of luck with your progress towards a better credit rating!

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