Before you start, you will need a copy of your credit report.

Get your FREE Credit Report. Goto FreeCreditReport.com

BASIC CREDIT REPAIR STRATEGIES

The basic strategy to repairing your credit is as follows:

1. Get and review your credit report.
2. Analyze your report.
3. Make a list of all items you consider to be questionable or negative. Clearly identify each item in your report that you     dispute, explain why you dispute the information,
4. Write a dispute letter bureaus.
5. Send the letter to the credit bureaus. Make sure you send it registered or certified mail.
6. Document your efforts. Record when you sent your letters, and the results.
7. Wait for the bureaus to investigate your claims.
8. Analyze the results.
9. Specialized techniques Was the item deleted or changed to your satisfaction? You may continue steps 1, 2 and 3     above until you feel the dispute is settled satisfactorily. Remember, there is no charge for a reinvestigation. If you don’t     get the results you want, dispute the listing again.

That's all there is to it. Seems easy enough but you must have patience, because the credit bureaus are not always very cooperative. They make their money by providing credit reports to lenders not by fixing bad information in their databases.

2. Analyze your credit report.
When you first receive your TransUnion and Equifax credit reports, you will be totally lost. The information is coded in a way that is not immediately readable by the average consumer. Each credit report should arrive with a key that interprets the codes and indicators on the credit report. Sit down with the credit report and the key and study it until you understand what each number and code means.

Don't write on your original credit report -- yet. Make all of your notes on a copy of the report. You will be sending your original report with your dispute letter, so you should make at least two copies of each new report. The original goes with the dispute, one copy is for notes, and the other copy is what you will send in to the credit agency.

Gather a yellow and orange high lighter pen. Whenever you identify a negative listing, mark the listing in yellow on your scratch copy of the credit report.

3. Rank questionable/negative items
Now you have this list, you should rank each item according to the amount of damage they are doing to your overall credit picture. Rank the most damaging information first, followed by the next most damaging information, followed by those items which are neutral. Do this for each credit report, as remember, they may not all have the same information on them. They may even have duplicate information. If this is the case, you will need to write to each credit agency individually for each duplicate item.

The items here are listed in order of descending importance with the first item being the "most damaging" to your credit.

Also, if your creditor has NOT notified you of negative information they have recently placed on your credit report, they are currently in violation of the Fair Credit Reporting Act. You can use this to pressure the original creditor to remove the listing by reminding them they are in violation of the FCRA by not notifying you.

4. Requesting Corrections and Disputing Your Credit
What should you challenge?

Everything, and you should always shoot for a complete deletion. Don't bother challenging the information within a collection listing, charge-off, court record, repossession, foreclosure, or settled account. As the basic nature of these listings is negative, changing the information within the listing will yield no improvement. Severely negative listings, such as these, must be disputed on the basis of complete deletion or not be disputed at all.

What items are the toughest to get off your report?

You will have the toughest time getting bankruptcies and foreclosures off of your credit report as these things are so easy for the credit bureaus to verify. In the case of a bankruptcy, you most likely will have a few trade lines saying "included in Bankruptcy". If you want to challenge your bankruptcy, you need to clear off all credit lines mentioning a BK FIRST.

Where do I get the forms to dispute?

Below you will find three separate PC Desktop Software programs that will help you
create the proper forms to submit to the Credit Bureau
Software Provided by: American Financing

FREE TransUnion® DISPUTE DATABASE STORES OVER 100,000,000 MILLION ENTRIES! AS SEEN IN THE

The TransUnion® Dispute Database v1.0 was designed to create an easy to read letter format to send to TransUnion® to dispute any negative items you may find. You simply enter in the required fields, click print and your dispute letter is created. Advanced features implemented are auto date, sort, find, import and exporting in all types of formats such as excel. You can even create additional databases if you like. The database will even store up to 100,000,000 Million entries!   Download   > Build Date: 2007.06.08   > File Size: 1.5 megs   > OS: win95, win98, win2000, ME, XP, Vista   > Uninstall: YES   > Support: Email   > File Type: EXE Published on:

The Equifax® Dispute Database v1.0 was designed to create an easy to read letter format to send to Equifax® to dispute any negative items you may find. You simply enter in the required fields, click print and your dispute letter is created. Advanced features implemented are auto date, sort, find, import and exporting in all types of formats such as excel. You can even create additional databases if you like. The database will even store up to 100,000,000 Million entries!   Download   > Build Date: 2007.06.08   > File Size: 1.5 megs   > OS: win95, win98, win2000, ME, XP, Vista   > Uninstall: YES   > Support: Email   > File Type: EXE Published on:

FREE Equifax® DISPUTE DATABASE STORES OVER 100,000,000 MILLION ENTRIES! AS SEEN IN THE

FREE Experian® DISPUTE DATABASE STORES OVER 100,000,000 MILLION ENTRIES! AS SEEN IN THE

The Experian® Dispute Database v1.0 was designed to create an easy to read letter format to send to Experian® to dispute any negative items you may find. You simply enter in the required fields, click print and your dispute letter is created. Advanced features implemented are auto date, sort, find, import and exporting in all types of formats such as excel. You can even create additional databases if you like. The database will even store up to 100,000,000 Million entries!   Download   > Build Date: 2007.06.08   > File Size: 1.5 megs   > OS: win95, win98, win2000, ME, XP, Vista   > Uninstall: YES   > Support: Email   > File Type: EXE   > Price: FREE Published on:

 
5. Make sure you send everything registered or certified mail.
This is important, as you must be able to tell when letters were sent and received. It gives you some leverage with the CRA's if they don't respond in the time frame required by law. For certified mail tips and tricks, read this.

6. Document Your Credit Repair Efforts
As soon as you have ordered your credit reports and photocopied your order letters and checks, you must create a precise organizational system to track your correspondences with the credit bureaus and your creditors. Why is this necessary? Unfortunately, credit items you have worked so hard to remove mysteriously reappear. If this happens, it is usually easy to have the items deleted permanently if you show your complete records on the first removal. Why take a chance? As you proceed through these steps, keep copies and records of all correspondence you send and receive. Copies of all correspondence are a must, as well as notes on all telephone conversations! Also, if you should encounter any special difficulty and would like help in repairing your credit, you will need these records to proceed.

Every time you have a telephone conversation with a creditor, you must document the conversation by recording the name of the person to whom you spoke, his or her position, the date and time of the conversation, what was said in the conversation, and what was agreed upon.

7. Wait for the credit bureau to finish investigating
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 Fair Credit Reporting Act of 1997, the credit bureaus must take the following steps:

The credit reporting agencies must resolve consumers' disputes within 30 days limit
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.

The Federal Trade Commission says that inaccurate credit reports are the number-one source of consumer complaints, and that it is quite common for problems to take six or more months to be resolved. All of the big-three agencies are working on making sure that all disputes are handled within 30 days.

If the new investigation reveals an error, you may ask that a corrected version of the report be sent to anyone who received your report within the past six months. Job applicants can have corrected reports sent to anyone who received a report for employment purposes during the past two years. However, this is unlikely to repair any damage done when your credit report was first pulled, so don’t waste your time or energy on this approach.

8. Evaluate the results of your repair efforts.
You did save the original credit report your ordered, didn't’t you? And each item you challenged? Good, you will need them to evaluate how well you did. It’s all part of Step 5 above, documenting your efforts.

When you get your “repaired” credit report back from the credit bureaus, they will summarize what changed on your credit report due to your challenges. You can compare this list to your own notes or just to the previous credit report.

9. Specialized techniques:
Depending on the type of listing, you may also want to try these separate techniques:

Collections - you should always try to use the debt validation technique on collections. This should be in addition to your credit repair efforts with the credit bureaus.

Charge-offs - Try disputing the information within the listing, like the date the account was opened, the high balance, the amount owed, etc. If any of the information is incorrect, you have a good chance of getting the whole thing deleted off of your report.

Judgments - If you were never served for a judgment, you may have a chance of getting it vacated (voided), or there may be other technicalities that you can use. Check out our new section on how to do this.

The results of each item will have been resolved in one of five different ways:

If the listing is not mentioned in the results list, you must have forgotten to include it, or your request was not sufficiently clear. You will need to dispute the item again in your next dispute letter. The bureaus are legally obligated to respond in writing within 30 days, so if they don't, it is highly unlike they are ignoring you.

The disputed item was investigated but verified.If you don’t get the item removed, most likely, the credit bureaus will have just given you a cryptic reason as to why like “item verified”.The creditor may have responded to the credit bureau's request for re-verification. They may have simply said that the listing was correct, and in this case, the bureau will take their word for it. Now it is up to you to prove to the bureau that the item is not correct. The law required that the bureaus accept any proof you may submit, as well as to pass any documentation you provide on to your creditor for consideration, so be sure to send any documentation you can, if you didn't’t do it the first time. You could also try disputing the listing again at a future time. Who knows, you may get lucky, and a different employee of the creditor may not be able to verify the item.

The disputed listing was investigated as to the correctness of the information within the listing (such as late pay notations) and the listing was found to be inaccurate or unverifiable. Remember, if the creditor doesn't respond to the bureau at all, this is the same as the listing being unverifiable. In this case, the negative listing will now show up as a positive listing, or it will be deleted from your report all together. This is the best possible outcome.

If you are not getting the desired results from the credit bureaus Credit bureau disputes are not handled by computers, but by people, so the possibility that your claims was misunderstood, overlooked or mishandled is good. Fixing your credit takes time, and there is nothing you can do to expedite the process. However, you can always resubmit your claims.

Tips for resubmitting your credit dispute

Be persistent! Become more insistent, but not more threatening, with each dispute. As you submit one dispute after another, it may become increasingly difficult to get the checker to initiate an investigation.Your first one or two disputes should be friendly and polite. Just like any other consumer, you can become frustrated and threatening as time passes. You may threaten to hire an attorney, you may threaten to complain to the FTC and your state's attorney general, etc. But don’t overdo it.

Be creative - Create and utilize other techniques that help further the idea that the dispute letter is from a truly wronged and disadvantaged consumer. The checker is only interested in investigating disputes that truly are erroneous and damaging. Again, because the agencies are flooded with requests, they tend to give priority to those that seem most urgent.

Do not bombard the credit bureaus with disputes (about the same listings, that is) - Do not bombard the credit bureaus with disputes. Sending one dispute right after another is wasteful and counterproductive. You may wind up alienating the credit agency so that they hold up your progress. (Remember, they cannot legally stop you from restoring accurate information but the people who run the agencies, like anyone else, probably do not respond well to harassment.) Also remember, that credit repair is a time-consuming operation requiring great patience. The rule of thumb is to wait 60 days between disputes of the same listing.

Haunting's
What if a removed negative item comes back on my credit report?

Ok, you’ve removed a listing and are breathing a deep sigh of relief. Then you get a letter in the mail from a credit bureau telling you the item has been added back on. What happened?

Reverified listings

This is actually becoming more commonplace: since the new credit laws require that the bureaus investigate and resolve your disputes within 30 days, they will sometimes remove the negative information temporarily until they get the information verified as true. Then they will put back any information verified to be true and notify you of this.By law, they can do this, but they have to notify you in writing.

Credit Scores
The Good the Bad and the Ugly!

What do they mean? There are three main companies that keep your information are, TransUnion, Experian and Equifax. These three companies are reported to by the lenders) of which you have applied for credit, whether you got it or not. They also keep a score record and each credit burro will be different.

Every lender will review one or all of the scores to see if you are secure enough for them to give you credit.

Some loan companies will take all three scores and average them out for a total score. Others will only use your highest one and some only pull the information from one credit source.

Here are two term words to remember. Prime and Sub-Prime. A Prime means you score above 660 points and a Sub-Prime means you are below 660 points on your credit.

The Score is based on 0 - 850 points and 850 being the best you can get.

The truth about credit repair

Be debt-free in 30 days!! Improve your credit score 200 points!! Wipe away negative records today!! Credit repair and debt consolidation companies like to make promises about delivering instant credit improvement. But the truth about these agencies and their impact on your credit can be shocking.

The usual suspects
Credit repair agencies break down in to three basic categories:
Credit counseling agencies - The credit counseling industry is a $7 billion a year industry, pretty profitable for a group of non-profit agencies. While some of these agencies can be helpful, many are expensive, ineffective and damaging to your credit. Most credit counseling agencies will negotiate settlements with your creditors and help you create a monthly budget for a fee.

Credit repair companies - Credit repair is credit counseling's evil twin. Companies that offer credit repair services often use illegal and unauthorized tactics to try to clear your report of accurate records. Promising to erase bad records and clear your debts, they usually just take your money.

Debt consolidation agencies - Debt consolidation agencies are similar to credit counselors in that they will work to negotiate settlements with your creditors. Debt consolidation agencies take it one step further and offer consolidation loans along with other services. Most debt consolidation agencies require you to have more than $7,000 or $10,000 in debt to participate.

The dangers
Each agency has their own procedures and terms, but there are a few things you need to look out for when dealing with a credit repair agency.

Fees - From set-up fees to percentage charges, reducing your debts can be surprisingly expensive. Even the non-profit agencies can sometimes charge hefty fees. This money takes away from the amount you can pay toward reducing your debts, so be sure you know exactly what you will be charged.

Late payments - It is fairly common for credit agencies to skip your first rounds of payments and pocket the money instead. This causes a record of late payments on your credit report that can damage your credit score for 7 years. If you are working with an agency, check your credit report to ensure that your payments are being made on time.

Credit records - When an agency negotiates a settlement with a creditor, your account could be marked as being involved in credit counseling. While most creditors and credit scoring formulas no longer consider this as a negative, there are some creditors that will not lend to consumers in credit counseling.

Consolidation - Some debt consolidators just negotiate with your creditors, but others actually consolidate everything into one loan. If this is a home equity loan, you could risk losing your home if you are unable to pay the loan. Some consolidators may also advise you to move your debts onto one account, but if your balances exceed 35% of the credit account's limit, your score could drop.

Disputing - Some agencies, especially credit repair, will submit dispute letters to the credit reporting agencies for accurate account records. While the chances of removing an accurate negative record from your report are slim, you run the risk of also removing positive account information from your report and lowering your credit score even further.


What to do
Everything that an agency can do, you have the power to do on your own. You can reduce your debts, negotiate settlements and improve your credit score from the comfort of your own home. Plus, with do-it-yourself credit improvement, all your money goes directly to the debts and you can avoid the practices that damage your credit. If you choose to sign up with an agency, select one with low fees that has a good reputation and that clearly explains their procedures.

Insight
Why does it seem like it's harder to get a home loan now days when there are so many houses for sale? In short, the reason is that the loan companies / banks were giving out home loans to people who could not afford to make the payments on large loan amounts. The financial institutions finally realized that their commissioned loan officers were doing anything to get their Commision bonuses knowing that the client could not afford the homes they were getting. Thus the market on foreclosures sky rocketed. Some financial institutions closed down, and others stopped giving out loans unless you had a prime score.

Insight
Which is better for me? A Prime or Sub-Prime Loan? Depending on your score, if you are above the 680 score mark your interest rates on your loan will be lower as the bank feels you are a secure risk. If your score is below 680 you can still qualify for a loan, however the banks consider you a risk and thus you will have to pay higher interest rates on your loan, but not to worry, as you get the loan with a higher interest rate and then fix your credit (Your Home Loan will help your credit rating) then refinance your home and get a lower rate.

Insight
What if I don't make allot of money and can't afford a house payment? What do you pay a month for renting? If your able to cover your rent, then find a house that will come close to the amount of rent you pay now. But I make low wages! Several years ago I was only making $6.25 an hour working as a security guard and I didn't think it was possible either, Well it is! I got a Three Bedroom House and Two New Cars three months later. The Government will qualify you as low income and would love to give you a home. It's called an FHA Loan. Call (866) 750-6551 and Tell them you are looking for an FHA Loan.

Insight
I've already had a Government Home loan and I don't qualify for a First Time Home Buyer! Yes you do. You can apply for a FHA loan as many times as you like, however your only allowed to own one FHA home at a time.

Insight
I work for Tips or Bonuses, how could I pay a payment with earnings like those? Look into Adjustable Rate Mortgages.

Insight
Should I buy a car before I buy a home? If your going to buy a home, buy the home first as a new car actually hurts your credit at first. Once you've purchased your home, you look stable.

Insight
Do inquiries hurt my credit? Yes, they do. When purchasing a home most people go out and get different quotes. Each is recorded into the credit reporting agencies, too many and your score drops.

Insight
I keep getting credit card offers and they keep making inquiries on my credit report, how do I stop them? Here is a website that will stop the credit card offers. OptOutPrescreen.com Choose the 5 year option. Plan on it taking one to three months to activate, it's free!

Insight
I found a company on the internet that say's if I pay them allot of money, they'll make my credit score go up so many points! Unless it's a Credit Repair company and you want to pay them for something you can do, go for it. If it's a so called pay point score, be very skeptical.

Insight
What are the differences in mortgage loan companies? There are allot of big differences, such as hidden fees, Hungry Pitbull Commissioned Mortgage Consultants. To good to be true interest rates. Promises never followed up on and the list goes on. Are you happy with the mortgage company you work for and why? Yes, they are family owned and valued. The mortgage consultants are on salary so they won't sell you on just anything to make a buck. They are one of the few companies that work with Prime, Sub-Prime, FHA and more. Even the Denver Broncos John Lynch recommends them. See for yourself, give them a call (866) 750-6551 or goto their website just for the heck of it, or just fill out the mini app at the top of this page, again, see for yourself!

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