Repair Bad Credit - How To

If you have a low credit score contrary to popular belief you do not have to just wait seven years for your credit report to naturally repair it self. You can take action today and remove bad credit items from your report.

Congress passed the Fair Credit Reporting Act which gives you the right to dispute any item on your credit report. This act also says that if the item is not verified by the lender then the credit bureau must remove it from your report.

To dispute an item you must create a dispute letter and send it to each credit bureau. You can hire a service to create this letter or do it yourself.

The bureau will receive your dispute and investigate. They will contact the lender and ask them to verify the dates on the account and the balance.

However if the creditor does not verify the account then the item must be removed from your report. It has been learned that once a charge off, repossession, and late payment have aged 2 years there is a high success rate that they will not be verified by the creditor.

This is a result of these lenders having received some form of payment. For example a charged off account has likely been sold to a collection agency. Thus the credit card issuer has no reason to save your account or records of it.

With judgments, bankruptcies, tax liens and recent delinquent accounts it is more difficult to remove these items from your credit. If you have one of these we suggest a service because they have more tactics they can use to remove an item.

When an item is verified a service can use advanced dispute techniques to dispute the item. These include; escalated dispute information requests, debt validation, and creditor direct intervention.

You can also help your credit score by opening a revolving unsecured credit line. This will help your score because you can create a positive payment history and improve your ratio of debt to available credit.

In sum, you should not wait seven years for credit repair to occur naturally. You can take steps today and rebuild your score.