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Legal Credit Repair Methods
To better understand what legal credit repair is, it would be helpful to
understand a few types of illegal credit repair:
Illegal: Changing your social security number to obtain a clean bill
of credit. If any company should suggest this type of credit repair, report
them to the authorities.
Illegal: Disputing every item on your credit report, regardless of
nature. The Fair Credit Reporting Act specifically states that only items
that are unverifiable, inaccurate or misleading should be disputed. Items
that are clearly yours, and reflect your credit history should not be
disputed.
Illegal: Charging for services that have not yet been completed. This
is to protect the consumer from fraudulent companies that charge for
services that never get completed (charging to "repair your credit", then
hitting the road...)
So, what exactly is Legal Credit Repair?
Legal Credit Repair consists of removing the negative items on a credit
report. There are a few different methods of going about this, the most
common and effective are:
"Goodwill" Negotiation
Negotiating directly with creditors and asking them to "please" remove
negative items from your credit reports is a viable method of credit repair
for mild late-pay accounts. There are no laws that require that negative
items stay on your reports for any amount of time, and creditors have the
ability to simply remove these items if they see that it could somehow work
to their benefit, even if that simply means a pleased customer.
Credit Disputation
The Fair Credit Reporting Act gives you the right to contact credit bureaus
directly and dispute items on your credit reports. Just as in a court of
law, you have the right to plead "not guilty" to negative information on
your credit reports, and leave the burden of proof to the credit bureaus.
You can dispute any and all items on your credit reports that you feel
classify as inaccurate, unverifiable, or misleading. If the bureaus can not
verify that the information on your reports is indeed correct, then those
items must be deleted.
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