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Is Cleaning Up Your Own Credit Reports Worth It?
- By Stuart Hunter
- Published Thursday 21st 2010
- Money and 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
As anyone who has researched credit repair has heard, you have the right to fix your own credit reports. 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", is recognized as an expert in the field of credit repair in part because of his knowledge gained through being an uber-do-it-yourselfer when it comes to credit improvement.
You have probably also read that you are able to dispute the inaccurate negative listings recorded in your credit reports free of charge. Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion even provide a form on their respective websites to make this process easy.
Some information you will not come across as often is that repairing your credit is usually not as simple as it initially seems. On its surface, repairing your own credit sounds like an easy proceedure. You get a copy of your credit reports, find the questionable credit listings, formally dispute them with the credit bureaus, and sit patiently as the bureaus perform their investigations. Of course, if the process really were that easy, there wouldn't be a need for any of the dozens of reputable credit repair companies.
As you keep researching the process of self credit repair, or get started with the work of repairing your credit, you will start to get an introduction to the difficulties of working to clean up your credit. You will find that it is not uncommon for the credit bureaus to refuse to investigate your disputes or to verify a negative item that is truly incorrect. You will find that cleaning your credit may involve also working with your creditors and, if they are unresponsive to your requests, utilizing your rights under the Fair Credit Billing Act to force them to correct or remove inaccurate listings. If you have inaccurate collections accounts showing on your credit file, you may find that you also need to deal with collections agencies in a similar fashion by taking advantage of your rights under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act.
Add to this that when communicating with each of these entities, there are protocols that, if not observed, could hurt your efforts. Even worse, there are some pitfalls you will need to avoid to make sure your credit rating does not get worse as a result of your credit repair efforts.
The benefits of improving your credit reports can be massive but the process is not always easy and not without risk. If things go poorly, your attempt to clean up your own credit could damage your credit rating and even result in you being sued. For these reasons, anyone looking to repair their own credit reports should adequately research the process before getting started.
As mentioned before, Dr. Padawer became a credit expert by educating himself about how consumers can correct their own credit. For most people, however, becoming a credit expert is not the goal. Instead, the goal is to correct the errors in their credit reports and this is why credit repair services exist.
In 2004, Lexington Law, the leading firm in credit report 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 have probably also read that you are able to dispute the inaccurate negative listings recorded in your credit reports free of charge. Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion even provide a form on their respective websites to make this process easy.
Some information you will not come across as often is that repairing your credit is usually not as simple as it initially seems. On its surface, repairing your own credit sounds like an easy proceedure. You get a copy of your credit reports, find the questionable credit listings, formally dispute them with the credit bureaus, and sit patiently as the bureaus perform their investigations. Of course, if the process really were that easy, there wouldn't be a need for any of the dozens of reputable credit repair companies.
As you keep researching the process of self credit repair, or get started with the work of repairing your credit, you will start to get an introduction to the difficulties of working to clean up your credit. You will find that it is not uncommon for the credit bureaus to refuse to investigate your disputes or to verify a negative item that is truly incorrect. You will find that cleaning your credit may involve also working with your creditors and, if they are unresponsive to your requests, utilizing your rights under the Fair Credit Billing Act to force them to correct or remove inaccurate listings. If you have inaccurate collections accounts showing on your credit file, you may find that you also need to deal with collections agencies in a similar fashion by taking advantage of your rights under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act.
Add to this that when communicating with each of these entities, there are protocols that, if not observed, could hurt your efforts. Even worse, there are some pitfalls you will need to avoid to make sure your credit rating does not get worse as a result of your credit repair efforts.
The benefits of improving your credit reports can be massive but the process is not always easy and not without risk. If things go poorly, your attempt to clean up your own credit could damage your credit rating and even result in you being sued. For these reasons, anyone looking to repair their own credit reports should adequately research the process before getting started.
As mentioned before, Dr. Padawer became a credit expert by educating himself about how consumers can correct their own credit. For most people, however, becoming a credit expert is not the goal. Instead, the goal is to correct the errors in their credit reports and this is why credit repair services exist.
In 2004, Lexington Law, the leading firm in credit report 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.