Credit Repair Advice – 5 Tips To Improve Your Credit Score

Having a good credit score is important to all of us, and if you have found yourself in a situation where your credit rating has slipped a little, or if you happen to have bad credit, here are 5 tips that will help you to regain your good standing with the credit bureau.

1. Speak to your creditors.

If you haven’t already spoken to the companies that you owe money to this is a number one priority. You will probably be surprised just how helpful they can be when you give them a call. They usually have a specially trained team of people whose sole job is to help you get things sorted out.

2. Don’t make arrangements you know you won’t be able to keep to.

If you’re talking to your creditors, and they suggest ways you can fix your credit don’t be tempted to accept something they suggest just to try and keep them happy. You will end up making the situation much worse. It’s always best to tell them the truth rather than to have to go back and renegotiate.

3. Stick to all the arrangements you make.

Ensure that you make the re-arranged payments on or before the date, they fall due. This will be shown on your credit report, and it will help to re-establish your credit rating much faster.

4. Don’t be tempted to try to borrow any further loans until you have sorted out your existing problems.

Each inquiry will be shown on your credit report, and it will make you look very unreliable if you are trying to take out more than you currently are able to pay.

5. Always tell the truth on future loan applications.

Tell companies that you have had a problem in the past, what you did to solve it and how you are now able to stick to your financial commitments. Don’t try to fool them – they will find out!

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The next step is to take stock of your progress on the items you have submitted for dispute to each credit bureau. The result of each item’s dispute will dictate what you do next. Basically, you will get one of the following results from your itemized disputes:

1. The item(s) you are disputing was not mentioned in the original dispute letter, or the description of the item and reason for dispute requires further clarification from you. In this case, once you respond with more info, the 30 day clock starts all over again.
2. The disputed item was verified and proven to be accurate. In this case, you move to the next phase of your plan, which I will explain in a minute.
3. The disputed item was not verifiable in time, or at all. IN this case, the item will be changed to positive status, corrected, or removed from the report altogether.

Obviously, the last outcome is what you are hoping for. If the item comes back as verified, I recommend next doing what is called a “Method of Verification” request. This is where the credit bureau has to respond to you within 15 days and explain to you the method they used to verify the negative item on your report. This is when you will get a letter from them stating that they used their software program eOscar to verify your item electronically.

eOscar is a bad way to verify because the clerk entering in your info just puts in a code to classify your dispute. This makes the dispute very generic, and can help you in a court case if you need to go to court to remove the negative items. Because of this non-personal way of verifying info, this tells us that they never contacted the information source, which is called the ‘Original Creditor’. This is good, this means that you can now contact the OC and ask them to investigate the item, stating that it is not valid.

The OC is under no obligation to verify the item for you, so don’t use the word verification , you just say investigation.  This way they have to respond to you, as stated in the FACT act of 2003. Send the original creditor a letter requesting that they provide you with documentation that the account is yours and the debt is yours. Never admit to anything. The truth is, if the account is a couple years old, they probably won’t have any original records. Then they will have to report to the OC that the account is not a valid item.

Wait for their response for a couple weeks, then if they don’t respond, send a more threatening letter, stating that you will sue them if they don’t prove it is yours or remove it. This method has worked many many times, so it is worth the effort.

Be sure to check back often for the third step in the credit repair process.

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