Your Credit Reports

As anyone who has looked into credit repair has heard, you have the right 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“, is recognized as an expert in the field of credit repair in part because of his knowledge gained through being a do-it-yourselfer when it comes to credit improvement.

You’ve likely also heard that you are able to dispute the inaccurate negative listings in your credit reports for free. The big three credit bureaus(Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion) even provide a form on their respective websites to make the process that much easier for you.

Something that you will not come across as often is that repairing your credit reports is usually not as simple as it may seem at first . Before you really get into it, repairing your own credit sounds like a straightforward process. You get a copy of your credit reports, locate the inaccurate credit listings, dispute them with the credit bureaus, and then wait for the bureaus to perform their investigations. Of course, if it really were that easy, there wouldn’t be a demand for any of the dozens of reputable credit repair companies.

As you continue researching the process of self credit repair, you will start to understand the difficulties of working to fix up your credit score. You will find that it is not uncommon for the bureaus to refuse to investigate your disputes or to verify and keep reporting an item that is actually inaccurate. You will learn that cleaning your credit may involve also dealing directly with your creditors and, if they prove to be unresponsive to your requests, utilizing your rights under the Fair Credit Billing Act to force them to correct or remove inaccurate listings. If you have inaccurate collections accounts listed on your credit reports, you may find that you also need to deal with collections agencies in a similar fashion by taking advantage of your rights under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act.

The benefits of improving your credit reports can be huge but the process is not always easy and not without risk. If things go poorly, working to improve your own credit could lower your credit rating and , in some cases, result in you getting sued. For these reasons, anyone interested in fixing their own credit reports should adequately research the process before they begin.

As mentioned above, Dr. Padawer became a credit expert by learning what people can do to repair their own credit. For the majority of people, however, the goal is not to become a credit expert . Instead, the goal is to correct the errors in their credit reports and this is why credit repair services exist.

In 2004, Lexington Law, the trusted leaders in credit 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 credit repair 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.

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