Regardless of your track record or credit history, you can take some simple steps and do your own credit repair. You can begin right away, and it won’t cost you anything – but the improvement can be gigantic!
To start, you’ll need to get a copy of your credit reports and actually go through them. There are three separate credit reporting bureaus and each one will have a slightly different report.
The law now provides consumers the right to one free credit report from each of the bureaus, Experian, TransUnion, and Equfax. You are entitled to one from each company every year.
The FTC, or Federal Trade Commission has a website set up specifically for this: annualcreditreport.com. This is the “official” site for these free reports – be wary of any other offers for “free” credit reports, as they won’t actually be free.
You can begin your credit repair efforts once you have your reports in hand. You will want to go through them carefully, line by line.
These reports will either include a “dispute” form, or give you a web address to get them. This is the key where you will begin to fix your credit.
For every entry that is incorrect, inaccurate, or outdated, you will be filing a dispute. Provide the correct information, or why it is incorrect, such as a debt that has been paid but not removed.
By federal law, the credit reporting bureaus have up to 30 days to verify each dispute. If they don’t do so, or don’t do it within the 30 days, they must remove those entries from your credit report.
This simple step can remove many of the negative strikes against you, and they will no longer count towards lowering your credit score. In many cases, this can lift your score by up to hundreds of points!