DO - IT-YOURSELF CREDIT REPAIR STEPS

1. Obtain and Review Your Credit Report. All the three credit bureaus are required by law to give out one free credit report per year. However that does not include your credit score which is essential to repairing your credit. To obtain your credit score along with your credit report you may have to pay for it. 

2.      Understand Your Credit Report: Your credit report is basically divided into four sections:

• Identifying Information: This includes your personal information such as names, addresses, date of birth, telephone numbers, employers, social security number and spouse's name. There could be multiple names and spelling errors because they were reported by others. Do not be too concerned about these.
• Credit History: Your credit accounts and payment history are listed in this section. The information here includes name of creditor, date account was opened, type of credit (mortgage, revolving or installment), cosigners, credit limit, balance, monthly payments, status of account (open, inactive, closed, paid, etc) and payment history (late payments, collections, charge offs, etc).
• Public Records: Information in this section is usually the most damaging to any credit report. They include Bankruptcies, foreclosures, repossessions, judgments, tax liens, garnishments etc
• Inquiries: Everyone who has requested a copy of your credit report within the last 2 years is listed here.

 

3.      Analyze Your Credit Report. To analyze your credit report, identify and make a list of all the derogatory or negative items in each credit report and rank them according to how damaging they are to your credit. In most credit reports negative accounts are often separated from positive accounts for easier analysis.

 

4.      Challenge Every Negative Item: Write letters disputing every negative item and requesting complete deletion from your credit report to each credit bureau. Include your full names, social security number, address, copy of your driver's license and the reason for disputing the item.  Begin the first round of disputes denying ownership of the account. Save disputing the accuracy of the information within the account to the next round of disputes. There may be many rounds of disputes before negative items could be removed.

 

5.      Wait for the Credit Bureaus to complete their Investigation; The law requires that the Credit Bureaus resolve consumers disputes within 30 days (45 days if you employed the services of annualcreditreport.com) and communicate that resolution to the consumers within 5 days of completing the investigation. Please understand that calling the credit bureaus to provide them with additional information resets the 30 days limit they have to get back to you.

 

6.      Review and Evaluate the response from the Credit Bureaus: Compare the response to your previous credit report, your notes and dispute letters to identify changes to your credit report as a result of your challenge. The negative item may either be verified or unverified. If verified you can repeat the challenge using other reasons. If unverified it ought to have been removed from your credit report by law.

 

7.      Repeat the Challenge: After review make a new list of all the negative items that are yet to be removed and dispute them again using other reasons listed here. Make sure not to appear frivolous or impatient. Credit repair is a time consuming operation.

 

8.      If for any reason you get trapped or start having difficulties along the line, simply talk to any of our customer service staff free of charge for help and other specialized techniques.