Anyone who has researched credit repair has heard that you have the right to repair your own credit. And you’ve probably also read that you can dispute inaccurate negative items in your credit reports for free.
Something that you likely will not hear as often is that credit repair is rarely as simple as it seems. On its surface, repairing your own credit seems to be an easy process. You get a copy of your credit reports, find each of the inaccurate credit listings, dispute them with the credit bureaus, and wait for the bureaus to perform their investigations.
As you continue exploring the processes of credit repair, you will start to understand that there are real challenges. You will find that it’s not uncommon for the credit bureaus to reject your disputes or to verify a negative item that is actually inaccurate.
You will find that repairing your credit report may involve working with your creditors. And if they are unresponsive or are slow and difficult, you have to enforce your rights under the Fair Credit Billing Act (FCBA) to force them to update or remove inaccurate listings.
If you have inaccurate collections accounts listed on your credit reports, you may find that you also need to work with the reporting collections agencies in a similar fashion by taking advantage of your rights under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA).
The benefits of correcting your own credit report can be valuable but the process is not without risk. If you go about it the wrong way or things go poorly, your efforts could result in further credit rating damage and even result in you being sued.
For this reason, anyone looking to repair their own credit should sufficiently research the credit repair process before they begin. Or simply find a reputable credit repair company or attorney that’s been doing it for awhile. Most reputable service providers can help you for a few hundred bucks.
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