Is It Worth the Effort to Fix Your Own Credit Reports?
Posted on January 22nd, 2010
As anyone who has looked into credit repair can tell you, you can work to repair your own credit reports. In fact, Dr. Randy Padawer, who co-wrote the best selling “FICO(R) 850” seminar for The Motley Fool and “Credit Revolution: Path of the Smart Consumer“, became a credit expert by becoming an uber-do-it-yourselfer when it comes to credit improvement.
You have likely also read that you are able to dispute the inaccurate negative listings recorded in your credit reports without having to pay anything. Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion even provide a form on their respective websites to make the process easy for you.
Some information that you likely will not come across as often is that repairing your credit reports is usually not as simple as it may seem at first . On its surface, fixing your credit sounds like a straightforward proceedure. You order a copy of your credit reports (free at www.annualcreditreport.com), find each of the questionable negative listings, formally dispute them with the credit bureaus, and wait for the bureaus to perform their investigations. Of course, if it were that easy, there would be no need for any of the dozens of reputable credit repair companies.
As you keep researching self credit repair, or get started with the work of repairing your credit, you will start to understand the potential difficulties of working to clean up your credit score. You will find that it is not uncommon for the credit bureaus to refuse to investigate your disputes or to verify and keep reporting a negative listing that is truly incorrect. You will find that cleaning your credit reports may involve also dealing directly with your creditors and, if they are unresponsive to your requests, invoking your rights under the Fair Credit Billing Act to force them to correct or remove inaccurate listings. If you have inaccurate collections accounts showing on your credit file, you may find that you also need to work with the reporting collections agencies in a similar fashion by taking advantage of your rights under the FDCPA.
The upside of repairing your credit reports can be huge but the process is not always easy and not without risk. If things go poorly, working to repair your own credit could lower your credit score and , in some cases, result in you getting sued. For these reasons, anyone looking to fix their own credit reports should adequately research the process before they begin.
As mentioned before, Dr. Padawer became a credit expert by learning what consumers can do to correct their own credit. For most people, however, the goal is not to become a credit repair expert . Instead, the goal is to correct the errors in their credit reports and this is why credit repair firms exist.
In 2004, Lexington Law, the leading firm in credit report repair, conducted a study of over 2,000 clients. A finding from this study showed that almost 40 percent of those surveyed had attempted to repair their own credit before enlisting the help of the firm. Even though it is something you can do for yourself “at little or no cost” according to the FTC, these people found it was easier to pay for credit repair services than to keep working on repairing their credit on their own.
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Tags: Credit Reports, Own Credit, Own Credit Reports, Reports
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One Response to “Is It Worth the Effort to Fix Your Own Credit Reports?”
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credit help Says:
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