How Can I Fix My Credit?

Here are the steps you must follow for successful do-it-yourself credit repair

• Get copies of, study, and understand the legal obligations of each party under the: Fair Credit Reporting Act, Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act, Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, Fair Credit Billing Act, and Truth in Lending Act. The credit reporting agencies, your creditors, and the collection agencies you will deal with are not going to help you because they want to – but because you will convince them that they have to.

• Get and review your credit reports from all three credit reporting bureaus, and from the fourth "hidden" credit reporting bureau that almost nobody even knows about.

• Decode your credit reports. Understanding every detail in the tradelines is critical.

• Analyze your credit reports.

• Make a list of all items you consider questionable or negative.

• Identify every item in each of your reports that you should dispute. Each credit bureau will likely have some different information.

• Prioritize the questionable and negative items. You cannot do everything at once.

• Draft a dispute letter for each credit bureau tailored to each questionable or negative item.

• Set up files to document every detail of every communication from every credit bureau, creditor, and collection for each dispute.

• Send your letters to the credit bureaus.

• Wait for responses.

• Analyze the results of your initial dispute letters.

• Determine if your strategy should be expanded to verification and validation techniques with creditors and collections.

• Draft reinvestigation dispute letters, validation letters and verifications letters, as the case may be.

• Send your letters to the credit bureaus, creditors or collections as the case may be.

• Modify and repeat as many times as necessary, but be careful to make the basis of each mailing different enough to avoid the "frivolous dispute penalty" that will get your dispute file tossed into the garbage can in a New York minute.

If you are not deterred then go to your library and take out all the books you can find on credit repair. Search the net for all the free credit repair help you can find. Be prepared for 6-12 months of the grind. Make a commitment to yourself that you will not get discouraged and quit.

If you are not deterred then go to your library and take out all the books you can find on credit repair. Search the net for all the free credit repair help you can find. Be prepared for 6-12 months of the grind. Make a commitment to yourself that you will not get discouraged and quit.

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