Credit Repair: Separating Fact From Fiction

It is not always easy to know the best way to deal with debt and credit problems. Most people would want to wipe the slate clean, but do not know how to do it. The facts of credit repair are often quite different from the fictions people have created in their minds.

Fiction: You have to pay huge amounts of money to get your credit repaired.
Fact: Some companies will charge high fees. Some even demand that you pay them money for the debts and then never send the money to your creditors. You can save yourself all this money by doing the credit repair yourself.

Fiction: You have to sign up with a credit report service to get a look at your credit report.
Fact: Those services offer some special features besides a simple credit report. Some, for instance, offer identity theft protection through alerts when someone uses your credit in an unusual way. However, you have the right to get one free credit report from each credit bureau each year. You can get them spaced out through the year to work on your credit repair.

Fiction: The best way to repair your credit is to sit down with a credit report and pay all the debts listed.
Fact: Almost anyone who gets a credit report will find something on there that does not belong to them. What is more, you can continue to work on credit repair even after you have disputed the obvious mistakes.

Fiction: There is a limit to the number of debts you can question.
Fact: The truth is that you could question every debt on your credit report no matter how many there are. The credit bureaus realize that mistakes are made. Mistakes, in fact, are made quite often. Finishing your credit repair may depend on this reality.

Fiction: There is a limit to the number of times you can question a particular debt.
Fact: The number of times you can question a single debt is limited only by your imagination. You cannot repeat a reason for questioning a debt if you have been satisfactorily answered. However, you can question the debt on other grounds. That is one tool in completing credit repair.

Fiction: Credit repair is best left to lawyers.
Fact: Most lawyers do not actually repair your credit. They advertise that they will help you do away with nagging creditors and escape judgments. The way they do this is not by fixing your credit, but by helping you file bankruptcy.

Fiction: It will take many years to repair your credit.
Fact: It does usually take several months to do the job. Yet credit repair rarely takes longer than a year or two to complete. As long as you are persistent and understand the process, you can get it done fairly quickly.

By sorting out the fact and fiction of credit repair, you can begin to get an idea of what is possible. Once you have explored your options, you will see that you can probably take care of your bad debts by following the correct procedures.