When doing credit report repair, you can find all kinds of advice on how to send your letters. If you are surfing the web looking for information about credit report repair, you will find free credit report repair letters at several sites, but you will also find that there are software programs with “fill in the blank” type letters. Before you buy one of the many credit report repair kits that are available on-line, there are certain sites you should visit to view and print the information that is included on your credit report.
According to the Fair Credit Reporting Act, consumers can dispute mistakes in their credit report for free. It can be a little time consuming to pull your report, document the error, type up a letter and send it in, so many people hire credit repair agencies to do the boring work for them. There is no real reason, other than the issue of time, to pour out money for work that you can easily do yourself.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that you don’t have the knowledge to clean up your credit report and that a credit repair agency knows a bunch of angles that have eluded you. Everything you need to know in order to fix errors on your credit report is readily available and there is nothing in the process that is required to be done by a third party or professional agency that specializes in credit repair.
Don’t fall for the ads that claim an agency can erase bad credit from your report. The only thing by law that can be changed on a credit report is inaccurate information. If you have had a bankruptcy, the only thing that will legally remove it from your credit report is time. Credit repair agencies charge anywhere from $400 to $2000 for their services and the reality is they are not doing anything that you can’t do for yourself. For $30 you can obtain a credit report that lists your history with all three credit bureaus. The rest of the investment in cleaning up your credit report is in the value of the time it requires.
If you find any inaccuracies, you can have your credit repaired by requesting, in writing, that the credit bureau investigate the disputed items. If you have any supporting documentation, include it, otherwise simply state where the confusion is and request that it’s looked into. This benefits you in two ways: first, if the credit bureau can not verify the information you are disputing, by default it must be removed from your file; second, if the bureau doesn’t respond to your request for an investigation within 30 days, the information in dispute must be removed.