What the information provided in this article does is help you fix ERRORS on your credit report and clean up those “questionable” items. While no one can legally remove accurate negative information from a credit report, the law does allow you to request a reinvestigation of information in your file that you dispute as inaccurate or incomplete. On the other hand, it is perfectly legal to challenge ANYTHING on your credit report. The whole key to repairing your credit is that if the credit bureu cannot verify information on your credit report they must remove it. For instance, if a credit bureau cannot contact a collection agency which is reporting a collection on your report, they cannot verify the information, and the credit bureau must delete the entry.

BASIC CREDIT REPAIR STRATEGY:

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 credit bureaus to investigate your disputes.
8. Analyze the results.
9. Repeat.
10. Free Sample Letter
11. What if a removed negative item comes back on my credit report?
12. What if I get stuck and need help?

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.

1. Get your credit reports

The cheapest way to get a copy of your credit report from all 3 reporting agencies is to visit AnnualCreditReport.com. NOTE: when you get your free reports, you will not see your credit score. Your credit score is the measure to see if you have actually improved your credit. I recommend MyFico.com because they give you your actual FICO score (also known as BEACON). There are a few out there that give you your actual FICO score… but most don’t. Avoid services that say "FICO Plus!" or anything like that.

2. Analyze your credit report.

What do all of those code mean?

3. Questionable or Negative Items

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

• Bankruptcy
• Foreclosure
• Repossession
• Loan Default
• Court Judgments
• Collections
• Past due payments
• Late Payments
• Credit Rejections
• Credit Inquiries

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. In your initial challenge, don’t dispute the information within a collection listing, charge-off, court record, repossession, foreclosure, or settled account. The easiest items to have deleted are items that are older then 7 years. All of those items will be deleted (except bankruptcy… which stays 10 years). Think about the account and what the most reasonable reason is for it to be deleted.

LIST OF REASONS

1. Not mine (not my account)
2. I didn’t pay late that month
3. Wrong amount owed
4. Wrong account number
5. Wrong original creditor
6. Wrong Charge-off Date
7. Wrong Date of Last Activity
8. Wrong Balance
9. Wrong Credit limit
10. Wrong Status (there are about 20)
11. Wrong High Credit (the highest amount you used)
12. I paid the account and it’s showing a balance
13. It’s been more then 7 years since it was first reported
14. Any combination of the above

What items are the toughest to get off your report?

You will have the toughest time getting bankruptcies, judgments, child support 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.

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 Credit Reporting Agencies if they don’t respond in the time frame required by law. You need to be documenting everything, and you want to make sure that you have a complete record of your disputes.

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.

7. Wait for the credit bureau to finishing 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, the credit bureaus must take the following steps:

• The credit reporting agencies must resolve consumers’ disputes within 30 days limit, unless you have used the services of annualcreditreport.com, then the bureaus can take up to 45 days.
• 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 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.

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

1. 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.
2. 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 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 do it the first time. I would also ask them for the proof with which they verified the item, which is going to force them to expose the fact that they are using eOscar. 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.
3. 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.

9. Repeat your credit bureau dispute:

It’s a good idea to keep disputing negative listings with the credit bureaus. If you hit on the right dispute, the listing could get completely removed from your report. For instance, if you dispute the date the account was opened, and the credit bureaus can not verify this information they may pull the whole listing. You will need to change the reason for the investigation so the credit bureau will have something new to investigate. Keep trying reasons from THE LIST. For example, the first time you challenge a listing, you might say the account is “not mine.” The second time through, you would say “never late.”

10. Sample Letter to dispute items

Sample Dispute Letter

Date

Your Name

Your Address

Your City, State, Zip Code

Complaint Department

Name of Company

Address

City, State, Zip Code

Dear Sir or Madam:

I am writing to dispute the following information in my file. The items I dispute also are encircled on the attached copy of the report I received.

This item (identify item(s) disputed by name of source, such as creditors or tax court, and identify type of item, such as credit account, judgment, etc.) is (inaccurate or incomplete) because (describe what is inaccurate or incomplete and why). I am requesting that the item be deleted (or request another specific change) to correct the information.

Enclosed are copies of (use this sentence if applicable and describe any enclosed documentation, such as payment records, court documents) supporting my position. Please investigate this (these) matter(s) and (delete or correct) the disputed item(s) as soon as possible.

Sincerely,

Your name

Enclosures: (List what you are enclosing)

11. 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.

If they DO NOT notify you in writing, it is an instant violation of the FCRA with a $1000 file PAYABLE TO YOU.

12. What if I get stuck?

Are you stuck and have a quick question? I recommend you visit Credit Boards.

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