Credit Repair Fixing Credit Repair Letters Dispute Report Items

Of course you can! Many of our readers (even yours truly) have cleared up a few blemishes on their reports. And by the way: everything a credit repair clinic can do for you, you can do for yourself at little or no cost. That being said, we know that sometimes people feel overwhelmed with the process and want to ask a live person a question if they get stumped. If you do, you can set up a paid consultation with one of our counselors for a small fee.

What the information provided in this page 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 an investigation of information in your file that you dispute as inaccurate or incomplete. On the other hand, *nudge* *nudge*, *wink* *wink*, it is perfectly legal to challenge ANYTHING on your credit report. There is no charge for requesting an investigation. The whole key to the credit repair procedure is that if the credit bureaus 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. Let's meet Edouardo.

Edouardo’s Story

Edouardo’s car, a hand-me-down from his father, is ready to give up the ghost. His girlfriend, Charisse, suggests he try to buy a newer car, though he is reluctant to spend the money. Although Edouardo makes a great living, his credit is in terrible shape due to a large number of unpaid medical bills, the result of an accident. Edouardo has seen advertisements in the local paper for credit repair services, and wonders how easy and how expensive it would be to fix his credit. Charisse makes a few calls for Edouardo looking into credit repair agencies and is suspicious of them. Besides, she once successfully disputed a late payment on her credit report. Edouardo and Charisse decide to see what they can do on their own to fix Edouardo’s credit.

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.

To obtain free copies of your report, please see Getting and reading your credit report. Please note: when you get a free report, you are not going to see your credit score, which is a crucial tool in getting your credit in shape. Here is a comparison chart of online credit score purchase options.

Once paying for his credit reports & scores online, Eduardo download his report and saved it to his computer. Eduardo used the free credit report analyzer which came with his credit report order to figure out which items on his report were damaging. After reviewing his credit reports, printed out his report then highlighted everything he saw as a negative listing along with what the computer analysis pointed out. Most of them were medical collections, and were easy to spot. However, he does notice that one of the bureaus is reporting him as late on a payment to one of his credit cards, and he knows he paid it on time.

In addition, Edouardo has read that as part of the new FACTA legislation to protect consumers from identity theft, he was supposed to have been notified of the negative mark. He is sure he was never notified.

Step 2 covered how to identify items, both positive and negative on your credit report. 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.

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. Save disputing the information within the listing for the NEXT ROUND OF DISPUTES. Start off the reason for your dispute on a negative listing whenever possible as "not mine". For a list of the most common dispute reasons, go here.

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 electronically through e-Oscar. 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.

Edouardo decided to challenge each and every one of his collections, as well as his credit card late payment. He wrote a letter to each of the credit reporting agencies that:

listed each of his negative listings by name, collection agency and amount of the delinquency
Under each of the list accounts, he said he was disputing the accuracy.
He also included his Name, SSN, Address, and a copy of his driver's license.
Edouardo sent his letters via Express Mail, which gives him a receipt for the mailing, and guarantees delivery. Total expense for Express Mail: $36.
Here is an example credit dispute letter.

This is important, as you must be able to tell when letters were sent and received. It gives you some leverage with the CRAs if they don't respond in the time frame required by law. For certified mail tips and tricks, read this. DON'T USE THE ONLINE DISPUTING SERVICE PROVIDED BY THE CREDIT BUREAUS. You need to be documenting everything, and you want to make sure that you have a complete record of your disputes.

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.

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 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.

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.

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. The order of the reasons should be:

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."

Tips for resubmitting your credit dispute

Be persistent! Become more insistent, but not more threatening, with each dispute. Make sure your letters are clear and to the point. Remember, an employee at one of the credit bureaus has about 4 minutes to enter the dispute into the computer for analysis by e-Oscar. Remember if you call the company, this resets the clock on how long they have to get back to you. If you are on day 29 of the 30 days that they have to get back to you and you call, the clock resets and they have 30 more days because you "provided them with more information". 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.
Do not bombard the credit bureaus with disputes (about the same listings, that is). Sending one dispute right after another is wasteful and counterproductive, even if you do use a different reason in your dispute. Again, you must remember to change the REASON for the dispute each time you submit. Otherwise, the dispute can be deemed frivolous and the credit bureau is under no legal obligation to take action. 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 WITH A DIFFERENT REASON FOR DISPUTING.

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

Edouardo receives his responses from the credit bureaus within the time allowed by law and eagerly rips open the envelopes. He was pleased to see that half of the collections were removed from his credit report and the late payment on his credit card has been corrected. On 3 of the collection accounts on his Equifax report, the results of the investigations were listed as "verified". Trans Union deleted all of the collection account listings, but Experian only deleted one of them. The rest of the listing investigations were listed as "verified".

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?

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. Many of our readers have had great success earning some easy cash by suing the credit bureaus for reinserted listings. Not only do you earn $1000, but that listing is removed from your report as well. Find out how!

After 3 total submissions to the bureaus disputing his credit, Edouardo succeeds in removing all of his collection accounts from his credit bureaus except for one on Experian. He recorded each transaction in his Palm Pilot, and the entire process took him 4 months. Each submission cost approximately $36 in mailing fees. He could have done the mailing cheaper by sending rregularregistered mail (about $10 instead of $36), but decided he wanted to save time by sending his disputes by Next Day Mail.

Edouardo's total costs: $132
Time it took to remove the negative listings: 4 months

Credit Repair * Credit Repair Letters * Repair Credit Reports * Fixing Reports * Dispute Items * Credit Report * Negative Items