How to repair your Credit Bureau – WITHOUT PAYING!

The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) was enacted to protect consumers against the reporting of inaccurate, misleading or obsolete information.

The FCRA provides a list of rights and procedures you can use in cleaning up any negative marks you may have on your credit reports. Remember you have to do this individually with each Credit Reporting Agency (CRA) Equifax, Experian, & TransUnion.

Just follow these step-by-step processes to repair your credit report.

Step 1: The first step is to get a copy of your credit report from all three of the CRA’s. Remember in an earlier post I talked about how to get a free copy.

Step 2: Analyze your credit report. You will want to overlook the credit report and highlight every negative item. You will also want to rank the negative items according to the amount of damage they are doing to your overall credit picture. Rank the most damaging information first on down to the least. Here is the list of items starting from the most damaging.

• Bankruptcy
• Foreclosure
• Repossession
• Loan Default
• Court Judgments
• Collections
• Past due payments
• Late Payments
• Credit Rejections
• Credit Inquiries

Step 3: Start disputing the negative items. In your initial challenge, don’t dispute the information with a court record, repossession, foreclosure, or settled account. Save disputing this information for the next round of disputes. Start off the reason for your dispute on a negative listing whenever possible as “not mine”.

Step 4: Have proof! Make sure you send everything registered or certified mail. This is important! You can use this later to leverage the CRA’s if they don’t respond in the time frame required by law. Also you will need to make copies of any and all letters you have mailed out. You might need this later in case any of the items you have worked to remove reappears.

Step 5: Wait for the credit bureaus to respond. 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 FCRA, the credit bureaus must take the following steps:

• The credit reporting agencies must resolve consumers’ disputes within 30 days limit, unless you have used the services of annualcreditreport.com, then the bureaus can take up to 45 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 five days of its completion, including a copy of the amended credit file if it changed based on the dispute.
• 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 notifies the consumer within five days.

Step 6: Evaluate the results of your repair efforts and repeat your credit bureau dispute with the ones you were unsuccessful with. You will want to change the reason for the dispute so the credit bureaus will have something new to investigate. Some of the reasons you can use are; not mine, paid on time, wrong amount, wrong account number, wrong date, wrong balance…I’m sure you get the idea. Make sure you become more insistent with each and every round of dispute letters.

Hopefully these credit repair tips will reward you with a higher credit score!