Undertaking Credit Repair On Your Own (What To Do And What Not
To Do)
If you have recently been turned down for a loan, or for a new
credit card, you may be in need of credit repair. Being denied
credit is often the result of a bad credit report, which can
happen in two circumstances. You have either managed your credit
poorly, which has reflected in your credit report; or your
credit file has some erroneous items, thus negatively impacting
your report. In either situation, it is vital that you undertake
credit repair as soon as possible.
TO DO:
Here is a strategy to help with your credit repair. You can do
this on your own and can thus repair your credit for free.
*Request a copy of your credit report from any one of the 3
credit bureaus. If this is your first request of the year, you
will be given the report for free.
*Once you have your report, examine it closely. You have to
study all the entries and mark all those which are incorrect and
which are damaging your credit worthiness.
*After you have determined the wrong entries, you have to
contact the credit reporting agencies and tell them to delete
the erroneous entries from your report.
*Even if there are some correct entries in your credit report,
but these are negative in nature, you could still get them
removed. This would go a long way in ensuring credit repair.
There is a certain time limit for which negative entries can
stay on your report (usually between 7 and 10 years). If such
time limit has passed, you should write to the credit bureaus to
delete the negative items from your report.
*Ensure that all your correspondence with the credit companies
and agencies is through registered mail. This way, you have
proof of your requests and also when exactly you initiated the
process of your credit repair. Keeping a record will also help
you in case any deleted entry is re-included in your report
anytime in the future.
*Within 30 days, some action should have been taken regarding
the wrong items on your report. If the credit bureaus determine
that the entries were in fact wrong, they will remove it from
your report, thus bringing about the credit repair that you were
after.
In case the matter is not resolved to your satisfaction, you
should continue challenging the items on your report till such
time that credit repair has indeed occurred.
NOT TO DO:
People whose credit score is low or who have a bad credit report
often try desperate means to repair credit and thus end up
hurting their credit even more. Most of the information
available on credit score repair and credit report repair tells
you what to do to restore good credit. However, we will tell you
about some of the things that you should NOT do in order to
repair bad credit.
1.File Segregation: Many credit repair companies lure people
with the false promises of bad credit repair by telling them
that they can create a new credit file for them by issuing them
a new identity. This is known as file segregation. However, you
need to understand that such a process is not legal and can even
put you behind bars if you try to segregate your credit file to
repair bad credit. Thus, no matter what any credit repair
company tells you - things like you will not be able to get any
loans or even a credit card for the next few years, or that you
will not be able to get a job etc; under no circumstances should
you agree to the process of file segregation to repair bad
credit.
2.Deleting accurate information from credit report: Some credit
repair agencies make claims to people that they can repair
credit by getting accurate information of a negative nature
deleted from their credit reports, thus improving their credit
rating. However, this simply cannot be done. Only inaccurate
information can be removed from a credit report and not accurate
data, unless such data is older than 7 to 10 years. Thus, you
should not trust anyone who tells you that they can repair bad
credit by removing negative items from your credit report.
3.Advance Payments: No credit repair agency is legally allowed
to ask for advance payments. They can only charge for services
that have already been given and not beforehand. Thus, you
should NOT be taken in by any company who wants high advance
payments.