Is It Worth It to Clean Up Your Own Credit?
http://www.articlesrevenue.com/articles/3431/1/Is-It-Worth-It-to-Clean-Up-Your-Own-Credit/Page1.html
Stuart Hunter
Providing credit repair services since 1991, Lexington Law has helped over 500,000 clients legally take on their credit and backs up the claim that they are "the trusted leaders in credit repair." By Stuart Hunter
Published on 01/21/2010
Working to repair your credit is something you can do yourself and there is no charge to do so. While this sounds promising, the reality is that self credit repair is rarely as easy as it first seems. Repairing your own credit will likely take a significant amount of time and knowledge.
Fixing Your Own Credit Reports: Is it Worth it?
As anyone who has looked into credit repair has heard, you have the right to fix 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 correction.
You've probably also heard that you can dispute the inaccurate negative items in your credit reports free of charge. Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion even provide a form on their respective websites to make the process easy for you.
Some information that you will not hear as frequently is that improving your credit is rarely as simple as it first seems. On its surface, fixing your credit sounds like an uncomplicated proceedure. You get a copy of your credit reports (free at www.annualcreditreport.com), find each of the questionable negative listings, dispute them with the credit bureaus, and wait for the bureaus to conduct their investigations. Of course, if the process were that trouble free, there wouldn't be a need for any of the many reputable credit repair companies.
As you keep researching the process of self credit repair, you will start to get an introduction to the difficulties of working to clean up your credit. You will learn that it is not uncommon for the credit bureaus to refuse to investigate your disputes or to verify a negative listing that is actually incorrect. You will find that repairing your credit may involve also dealing directly with your creditors and, if they are unresponsive to your requests, invoking your rights under the Fair Credit Billing Act to force them to correct or remove inaccurate listings. If you have inaccurate collections accounts listed on your credit reports, you may find that you also need to deal with collections agencies in a similar fashion by taking advantage of your rights under the FDCPA.
Add to this additional workload that when communicating with each of these companies, there are set proceedures that, if not observed, could slow or stall your credit repair efforts. Even worse, there are some pitfalls you will need to be aware of and avoid to make sure your credit rating does not get worse as a result of your credit repair efforts.
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 repair your own credit could damage your credit rating and , in some cases, result in you being sued. For these reasons, anyone looking to clean up their own credit reports should thoroughly research the process before getting started.
As mentioned above, Dr. Padawer became a credit expert by learning what consumers can do to repair their own credit. For most people, however, becoming a credit expert is not the goal. Instead, 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 credit repair 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 Lexington Law's credit repair services than to keep trying to repair their own credit.
You've probably also heard that you can dispute the inaccurate negative items in your credit reports free of charge. Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion even provide a form on their respective websites to make the process easy for you.
Some information that you will not hear as frequently is that improving your credit is rarely as simple as it first seems. On its surface, fixing your credit sounds like an uncomplicated proceedure. You get a copy of your credit reports (free at www.annualcreditreport.com), find each of the questionable negative listings, dispute them with the credit bureaus, and wait for the bureaus to conduct their investigations. Of course, if the process were that trouble free, there wouldn't be a need for any of the many reputable credit repair companies.
As you keep researching the process of self credit repair, you will start to get an introduction to the difficulties of working to clean up your credit. You will learn that it is not uncommon for the credit bureaus to refuse to investigate your disputes or to verify a negative listing that is actually incorrect. You will find that repairing your credit may involve also dealing directly with your creditors and, if they are unresponsive to your requests, invoking your rights under the Fair Credit Billing Act to force them to correct or remove inaccurate listings. If you have inaccurate collections accounts listed on your credit reports, you may find that you also need to deal with collections agencies in a similar fashion by taking advantage of your rights under the FDCPA.
Add to this additional workload that when communicating with each of these companies, there are set proceedures that, if not observed, could slow or stall your credit repair efforts. Even worse, there are some pitfalls you will need to be aware of and avoid to make sure your credit rating does not get worse as a result of your credit repair efforts.
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 repair your own credit could damage your credit rating and , in some cases, result in you being sued. For these reasons, anyone looking to clean up their own credit reports should thoroughly research the process before getting started.
As mentioned above, Dr. Padawer became a credit expert by learning what consumers can do to repair their own credit. For most people, however, becoming a credit expert is not the goal. Instead, 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 credit repair 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 Lexington Law's credit repair services than to keep trying to repair their own credit.