How Can I Fix My Credit Report?

1) Request a copy of your Credit Report

2) Review your Credit Report

3) Rank the Questionable or Negative Items

Here is a rank of damaging items that could be on your credit report.

4) Dispute Credit Report Errors and Request Corrections

What are the items that you should challenge?

In a single word...Everything. When it comes to errors on your credit report, you should always try to get a complete deletion. On the first round, don't dispute all of the things within the collection listing. You can do that later after they respond. At first, just submit a negative error as "not mine".

What are the items that are the toughest to remove from your credit report?

Getting bankruptcies, child support, foreclosures, and judgments removed from your credit report is very difficult because the credit agency can easily verify them. With a bankruptcy you will likely have some accounts that say something to the effect of "included in Bankruptcy". So if you want to remove a bankruptcy, you'll first need to remove those other accounts.

5) Send Everything Registered or Certified Mail

This is important, as you must be able to tell when letters were sent and received. It gives you some leverage with the CRAs if they don't respond in the time frame required by law. DON'T USE THE ONLINE DISPUTING SERVICE PROVIDED BY THE CREDIT BUREAUS. You need to be documenting everything, and you want to make sure that you have a complete record of your disputes.

6) Documenting Your Credit Repair Efforts

After you have ordered your credit reports and photocopied your order letters and checks, you should create a system of organizing and tracking your correspondences with the credit reporting agencies and creditors. Credit items that you work so hard to remove may reappear for no apparent reason and if you can show your complete records of your first removal it can be a lot easier to have the items deleted permanently.

As you go through these steps you should keep very precise records of everything you’ve done and copies of all correspondence sent and received. This includes notes from telephone conversations. Make sure you get name of the person you spoke with and their position, the date and time of the conversation, what was talked about and what was agreed upon.

7) Wait For The Credit Bureau Response To The Investigation

Credit Bureaus are required to investigate after receiving a dispute letter. This obligation hold true even if you weren’t necessarily denied credit. To be in compliance with the Fair Credit Reporting Act, the credit agencies must take the following steps:

• The credit bureau must resolve the issue within 30 days unless you have used annualcreditreport.com, then the bureaus can take up to 45 days.
  
  
• If the customer claims that the bureau disregarded the documents that supported their dispute, the credit bureaus have to consider and transmit to the furnisher all relevant evidence submitted by the consumer the first time.
  
  
• Consumers will receive written notice of the results of the investigation within five days of its completion, including a copy of the amended credit file if it changed based on the dispute.
  
  
• Once information is deleted from a credit file, the credit bureaus can not reinsert the information unless the entity supplying the information certifies that the item is complete and accurate and the credit bureau notifies the consumer within 5 days.
  
  

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) says that inaccurate credit reports are the number-one source of consumer complaints, and that it is quite common for problems to take six or more months to be resolved. All of the big-three agencies are working on making sure that all disputes are handled within 30 days.

If the new investigation reveals an error, you may ask that a corrected version of the report be sent to anyone who received your report within the past six months. Job applicants can have corrected reports sent to anyone who received a report for employment purposes during the past two years. However, this is unlikely to repair any damage done when your credit report was first pulled, so don’t waste your time or energy on this approach.

8) Evaluate The Results of Your Credit Repair

Pull out the original credit report your ordered and compare it with your notes of the items you challenged to see if your new report has seen some of the items resolved.

When you get your "repaired" credit report back from the credit bureaus, they will summarize what changed on your credit report due to your challenges. You should compare this list to your own notes or just to the previous credit report.

The results of each item will have been resolved in one of five different ways:

1. If the listing is not mentioned in the results list, you must have forgotten to include it, or your request was not sufficiently clear. You will need to dispute the item again in your next dispute letter. The bureaus are legally obligated to respond in writing within 30 days, so if they don't, they are likely not ignoring you and you should check to make sure there wasn’t a mix up with your mail. You may want to call to confirm that a resolution was sent regarding your dispute.
   
2. The disputed item was investigated but verified. If you don’t get the item removed, most likely, the credit bureaus will have just given you a cryptic reason as to why like "item verified". The law required that the bureaus accept any proof you may submit, as well as to pass any documentation you provide on to your creditor for consideration, so be sure to send any documentation you can, if you didn’t do it the first time. You could also try disputing the listing again at a future time. It is sad to say but sometimes you can just get luckily with an employee of the creditor that may not be able to verify the item in their system. If the account does come back as "verified", you may want to try the disputing the listing with the original creditor.
   
3. The disputed listing was investigated as to the correctness of the information within the listing (such as late pay notations) and the listing was found to be inaccurate or unverifiable. Remember, if the creditor doesn't respond to the bureau at all, this is the same as the listing being unverifiable. In this case, the negative listing will now show up as a positive listing, or it will be deleted from your report all together. This is the best possible outcome.
   

9) Repeat Your Credit Bureau Dispute

It's a good idea to keep disputing negative listings with the credit bureaus. If you hit on the right dispute, the listing could get completely removed from your report. For instance, if you dispute the date the account was opened, and the credit bureaus can not verify this information they may pull the whole listing. Make sure you change the reason for the investigation so the credit bureau will have something new to investigate. The order of the reasons should be:

1. Not mine (not my account)
   
2. I didn't pay late that month
   
3. Wrong amount
   
4. Wrong account number
   
5. Wrong original creditor
   
6. Wrong Charge-off Date
   
7. Wrong Date of Last Activity
   
8. Wrong Balance
   
9. Wrong Credit limit
   
10. Wrong Status (there are about 20)
    
11. Wrong High Credit (the highest amount you used)
    
    

10) Additional Techniques

Depending on the type of listing, you may also want to try these separate techniques:

• Collections - This is actually an easy type of listing to deal with.
• Charge-offs. Try disputing the information within the listing, like the date the account was opened, the high balance, the amount owed, etc. If any of the information is incorrect, you have a good chance of getting the whole thing deleted off of your report.
• Judgments. If you were never served for a judgment, you may have a chance of getting it vacated (voided), or there may be other technicalities that you can use. Check out our new section on how to do this.

11) What if Removed Items Come Back?

If you have finally got an item removed and it reappears here are several possible reasons.

Reverified listing

This is happening more frequently. Because the new credit laws require that the bureaus investigate and resolve your disputes within 30 days, they will sometimes remove the negative information temporarily until they get the information verified as true. Then they will put back any information verified to be true and notify you of this. By law, they can do this, but they have to notify you in writing.

If they DO NOT notify you in writing, it is an instant violation of the FCRA with a $1000 file PAYABLE TO YOU.