How to Repair Your Credit - Free Information to Fix Your Credit
Having good credit can mean the difference between getting a loan or not. But can you repair your credit on your own? Yes you can! Thousands of our readers have removed negatives and increased their credit score by using our ethical "How to Repair Credit" techniques. By the way, everything a credit repair company can do for you, you can do for yourself at a fraction of the cost.
However, we know sometimes people feel overwhelmed with the credit repair process and want to ask a live person a question if they get stumped. If you do, we recommend American Consumer Credit Repair Center. We've had a relationship with them since 2000 and we have visited their corporate office. They offer a FREE initial Credit Consultation (which also includes a Credit Report Summary and Credit Score) and they use the same ethical credit repair techniques we talk about on our website.
Now, before you get started, it's important to know the methods that don't work and can actually hurt your credit repair efforts. We suggest you read these articles: "Myths about Credit Repair" and "Innocent Ways You Can Ruin Your Credit". We might also suggest you watch our credit repair video.
The information provided on this page is mainly intended to help you fix ERRORS on your credit and clean up those "questionable" items. However, the law does allow you to request an investigation of ANY information in your file that you dispute as inaccurate or incomplete. It is perfectly legal to challenge ANYTHING in your credit bureau file and there is no charge for requesting an investigation.
The whole key to the credit repair procedure is that if a credit bureau cannot verify information on your credit report within the time allowed by law, they must remove it. For instance, if a collection agency is reporting a collection on your report and they cannot verify the information, the credit bureau must delete the entry.
Credit Repair Strategy
Review Your Credit Report
There are a lot of offers out there where you can order your credit reports and get your credit score. Our comparison chart of credit report services will help you decide which one is right for you. Please note: If you go to AnnualCreditReport.com and get your yearly free report, you are not going to see your credit score, which is a crucial tool in getting your credit in shape. You can pay an extra fee to see your scores.
Analyze Your Credit Report
Now that you have your credit reports in your hands, time to figure out what it all means. Our articles "Getting and Reading Your Credit Report" and "Decoding Your Report" are excellent resources to turn to as you start to fix your credit.
You can use the free analyzer which may have been provided to help you figure out which items are lowering your credit score. After reviewing your credit reports, print them out (it's worth the cost of the ink) and then highlight everything you see as a negative listing along with what the computer analysis pointed out.
Rank Negative Items
The article we linked to in the above paragraph showed you how to decode your report. It covered how to identify items as being either positive or negative. Now that you have your list of negative items, you should rank each item according to the amount of damage it is doing to your overall credit score. Rank the most damaging first, followed by the next most damaging, followed by those items which are neutral. Do this for each report, and remember, they may not all have the same information on them. They may even have duplicate information on them. If this is the case, you will need to write to each credit bureau individually for each duplicate item.
The items here are listed in order of "most damaging" to "least damaging" to your credit:
- Bankruptcy
- Foreclosure
- Repossession
- Loan Default
- Court Judgments
- Collections
- Past due payments
- Late Payments
- Credit Rejections
- Credit Inquiries
Also, if your creditor has NOT notified you of negative information they have recently placed on your credit report, they are currently in violation of the Fair Credit Reporting Act. You can use this to pressure the original creditor to remove the listing by reminding them they are in violation of the FCRA by not notifying you.
Write Dispute Letters to the Credit Bureaus
What should you challenge? Everything - and you should always shoot for a complete deletion. In your initial challenge, don't dispute the information within a collection listing, charge-off, court record, repossession, foreclosure, or settled account. Save disputing the information within the listing for the next round of disputes. Start off the reason for your initial dispute on a negative listing whenever possible as "not mine". There is a complete list of the most common dispute reasons further below.
What items are the toughest to get off your report? You will have the toughest time getting bankruptcies, judgments, child support and foreclosures off of your credit report as these things are so easy for the credit bureaus to verify electronically through e-Oscar. In the case of a bankruptcy, you most likely will have a few trade lines saying "included in bankruptcy". If you want to challenge your bankruptcy, you need to clear off all credit lines mentioning a BK FIRST.
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