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Is Cleaning Up Your Own Credit Reports Worth It?
- By Stuart Hunter
- Published 01/21/2010
- Business & Finance
- Unrated
Stuart Hunter
Providing credit repair services since 1991, Lexington Law has helped over 500,000 clients legally take on their credit. Last year alone, Lexington Law helped clients remove over 600,000 negative items from their credit reports.
View all articles by Stuart Hunter
Anyone who has looked into credit repair can tell you, you can work to repair 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", became a credit expert by becoming a do-it-yourselfer when it comes to credit improvement.
You've likely also heard that you can dispute the questionable negative items in your credit reports for free. The big three credit bureaus even provide a dispute tool on their websites to make the process that much easier for you.
Some information that you likely will not hear as often is that improving your credit is rarely as simple as it may seem at first . Before you really get into it, fixing your own credit sounds like a straightforward process. You order a copy of your credit reports (free at www.annualcreditreport.com), locate each of the inaccurate negative listings, dispute them with the credit bureaus, and then wait for the bureaus to conduct their investigations. Of course, if it were that trouble free, there would be no demand for any of the many reputable credit repair companies.
As you continue researching self credit repair, you will start to understand the potential difficulties of working to repair your credit score. You will learn that it is typical for the bureaus to reject your disputes or to verify and keep reporting an listing that is truly inaccurate. You will learn that
fixing your credit reports may involve also dealing directly with your creditors and, if they prove to be unresponsive to your needs, invoking your rights under the FCBA to force them to update or remove inaccurate listings. If you have inaccurate collections accounts showing 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 FDCPA.
The upside of correcting your credit reports can be huge but the journey is not always easy and not without risk. If things go poorly, working to improve your own credit could lower your credit score and , in some cases, result in you getting sued. For this reason, 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 consumers can do to repair their own credit. For the majority of people, however, the goal is not to become an expert at credit repair . The goal is to remove the negative items their credit reports and this is why credit repair firms 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 it 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 credit on their own.
You've likely also heard that you can dispute the questionable negative items in your credit reports for free. The big three credit bureaus even provide a dispute tool on their websites to make the process that much easier for you.
Some information that you likely will not hear as often is that improving your credit is rarely as simple as it may seem at first . Before you really get into it, fixing your own credit sounds like a straightforward process. You order a copy of your credit reports (free at www.annualcreditreport.com), locate each of the inaccurate negative listings, dispute them with the credit bureaus, and then wait for the bureaus to conduct their investigations. Of course, if it were that trouble free, there would be no demand for any of the many reputable credit repair companies.
As you continue researching self credit repair, you will start to understand the potential difficulties of working to repair your credit score. You will learn that it is typical for the bureaus to reject your disputes or to verify and keep reporting an listing that is truly inaccurate. You will learn that
The upside of correcting your credit reports can be huge but the journey is not always easy and not without risk. If things go poorly, working to improve your own credit could lower your credit score and , in some cases, result in you getting sued. For this reason, 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 consumers can do to repair their own credit. For the majority of people, however, the goal is not to become an expert at credit repair . The goal is to remove the negative items their credit reports and this is why credit repair firms 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 it 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 credit on their own.