How To Clean Up Your Credit Report
Looking to clear up some negative items off your credit report? Did you know that Congress passed legislation that entitles you to dispute and have any item on your report investigated by the bureaus?
For good reason too, as it is estimated one in every four reports contains an error on it. This error could be damaging your score!
How Can I Remove Bad Credit?
You will need to file a credit dispute with the bureaus. To do this you must write a dispute letter in which you indicate the item you want the bureau to investigate, the reason it is inaccurate and any other supporting documentation.
The bureau will contact the lender and ask them to verify the account, the dates on it, and the balance. If this item can not be verified then the bureau must remove it from your report.
Why Do Investigations Often Result In Removal Of Items?
Often an investigation will result in the removal of an item from your report. This is for a few reasons the most common is that lenders are unwilling to verify old delinquent debts.
Let’s look at an example to fully understand why this happens. Let’s say you had a credit card that you stopped making payments on. The credit card issuer will contact you and try to work some form of payment plan out with you for roughly six months.
After that the issuer will ‘charge off’ your account. You will get a negative mark on your report and the card issuer will be able to use your account as a tax write off. Next the issuer will sell your debt account to another collection agency for literally pennies on the dollar.
This next collection agency will begin contacting you in an attempt to collect this debt. However the card issuer no longer has any need to keep your information. It will cost them money just to keep the record of your account, further they no longer can legally collect any money towards this debt. They sold the legal rights to it to the collection agency. In other words the card issuer has no motive to keep your information and even less motive to verify the account.
When the bureaus contact them, they will not want to spend the time or money to verify this account as there is no financial motive and the card issuer is after all a business with profits being their number one priority. Thus, once your dispute is investigated it will often be removed.
I Thought It Was Hard To Remove Bad Credit?
It definitely can be. You can try to fix your report yourself or you can hire a professional service that will employ credit lawyers and have legal resources at your disposal. The difficulty begins when you file your dispute.
Before the bureaus will investigate your dispute they must deem it valid. This practice makes no rational sense as the bureaus have been fined countless times for not complying with the Fair Credit Reporting Act. This legislation is what entitles you to dispute an item on your report.
We are fairly confident this is a result of big business and their wealthy arms influencing law makers. As the FCRA was passed in 1970 in an effort to protect consumers and has since been watered down tremendously and the myth that credit repair is illegal has emerged as a result of this big business influence. On a side note bureaus are some of the biggest businesses in the United States with reported annual revenues in the billions of dollars ever year!
For a free credit consultation call 1-800-768-3386 or for more about how to clean up credit report or for more about how to clear my credit history visit us.