Is Cleaning Up Your Own Credit Reports Worth It?
http://www.ads-get-read.co.uk/articles/106077/1/Is-Cleaning-Up-Your-Own-Credit-Reports-Worth-It/Page1.html
Stuart Hunter
Providing credit repair services since 1991, Lexington Law has helped over 500,000 clients legally take on their credit. Last year alone, Lexington Law helped clients remove over 600,000 negative items from their credit reports. By Stuart Hunter
Published on Thursday 21st 2010
Repairing your credit is something you can do yourself at little or no cost. While this sounds promising, the truth is that self credit repair frequently is not as easy as it first seems. Repairing your credit by yourself will likely take a significant amount of time and education.
Is Repairing Your Own Credit Worth It?
Anyone who has looked into credit repair has heard, you can work to fix your own credit. In fact, Dr. Randy Padawer, who co-wrote the best selling "FICO(R) 850" seminar for The Motley Fool and "Credit Revolution: Path of the Smart Consumer", became a credit expert by becoming a do-it-yourselfer when it comes to credit improvement.
You've probably also heard that you can dispute the inaccurate negative items recorded in your credit reports free of charge. Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion even provide a form on their websites to make the process that much easier.
Some information that you will not hear as often is that credit repair is rarely as simple as it seems. On its surface, improving your own credit sounds like an easy proceedure. You order a copy of your credit reports, find the inaccurate credit listings, formally dispute them with the credit bureaus, and sit patiently as the bureaus conduct their investigations. Of course, if the process were that trouble free, there wouldn't be a demand for any of the many reputable credit repair companies.
As you continue researching self credit repair, you will start to understand the potential difficulties of working to clean up your credit score. You will learn that it is not uncommon for the bureaus to refuse to investigate your disputes or to verify a negative listing that is truly inaccurate. You will learn that repairing your credit may involve also dealing directly with your creditors and, if they are unresponsive to your needs, utilizing your rights under the Fair Credit Billing Act to force them to update or remove inaccurate listings. If you have inaccurate collections accounts showing on your credit file, you may find that you also need to deal with the reporting collections agencies in a similar fashion by taking advantage of your rights under the FDCPA.
Add to this additional workload that when dealing with each of these companies, you will find there are set protocols that, if not observed, could slow your efforts. Even worse, there are some pitfalls you will need to be aware of and avoid to make sure your credit rating does not lower as a result of your efforts.
The upside of improving your credit reports can be life changing but the process is not always easy and not without risk. If things go poorly, working to improve your own credit could damage your credit rating and even result in you being sued. For this reason, anyone interested in repairing their own credit reports should adequately research the process before getting started.
As mentioned before, Dr. Padawer became a credit expert by learning what people can do to correct their own credit. For the majority of people, however, the goal is not to become a credit repair expert . The goal is to correct the errors in their credit reports and this is why credit repair companies exist.
In 2004, Lexington Law, the leading firm in credit report repair, conducted a study of over 2,000 clients. A finding from this study showed that almost 40 percent of those surveyed had attempted to repair their own credit before enlisting the help of the firm. Even though it is something you can do for yourself "at little or no cost" according to the FTC, these people found it was easier to pay for credit repair services than to keep working on repairing their own credit.
You've probably also heard that you can dispute the inaccurate negative items recorded in your credit reports free of charge. Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion even provide a form on their websites to make the process that much easier.
Some information that you will not hear as often is that credit repair is rarely as simple as it seems. On its surface, improving your own credit sounds like an easy proceedure. You order a copy of your credit reports, find the inaccurate credit listings, formally dispute them with the credit bureaus, and sit patiently as the bureaus conduct their investigations. Of course, if the process were that trouble free, there wouldn't be a demand for any of the many reputable credit repair companies.
As you continue researching self credit repair, you will start to understand the potential difficulties of working to clean up your credit score. You will learn that it is not uncommon for the bureaus to refuse to investigate your disputes or to verify a negative listing that is truly inaccurate. You will learn that repairing your credit may involve also dealing directly with your creditors and, if they are unresponsive to your needs, utilizing your rights under the Fair Credit Billing Act to force them to update or remove inaccurate listings. If you have inaccurate collections accounts showing on your credit file, you may find that you also need to deal with the reporting collections agencies in a similar fashion by taking advantage of your rights under the FDCPA.
Add to this additional workload that when dealing with each of these companies, you will find there are set protocols that, if not observed, could slow your efforts. Even worse, there are some pitfalls you will need to be aware of and avoid to make sure your credit rating does not lower as a result of your efforts.
The upside of improving your credit reports can be life changing but the process is not always easy and not without risk. If things go poorly, working to improve your own credit could damage your credit rating and even result in you being sued. For this reason, anyone interested in repairing their own credit reports should adequately research the process before getting started.
As mentioned before, Dr. Padawer became a credit expert by learning what people can do to correct their own credit. For the majority of people, however, the goal is not to become a credit repair expert . The goal is to correct the errors in their credit reports and this is why credit repair companies exist.
In 2004, Lexington Law, the leading firm in credit report repair, conducted a study of over 2,000 clients. A finding from this study showed that almost 40 percent of those surveyed had attempted to repair their own credit before enlisting the help of the firm. Even though it is something you can do for yourself "at little or no cost" according to the FTC, these people found it was easier to pay for credit repair services than to keep working on repairing their own credit.