Very few people are able to go through life without having a credit problem or two. Right now with the current economic recession even more people are struggling with their credit.
Unfortunately though, credit is often a very necessary part of life and most people depend upon credit in order to purchase the bigger items such as cars and houses. Fortunately, there are steps that you can take to repair or at least improve your credit.
Where are you starting from?
The first step to making improvements towards your credit is to know exactly where you are starting from. As a consumer you are entitled to receive a free credit report one time each year from each of the three main credit reporting agencies, Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. You should take advantage of this opportunity and make sure and get all three.
Check over your credit report.
When you receive your reports you should check all of them over very carefully. Estimates are that as many as 75% or even more of all credit reports contain the type of errors that can and should be deleted and when they are deleted the credit scores will go up. Often even credit that seems accurate has minor mistakes and errors that hurt your credit score.
Should you file a dispute?
A common and useful way to get erroneous credit removed from your account is to offer a dispute to the credit bureaus. You need to send a detailed yet concise letter to the bureaus explaining why the credit is wrong and requesting an investigation. The bureaus will have 30 days in which to either verify the accuracy of their reporting or to delete the item from the report completely.
Here are other credit repair tips:
There are also even more effective credit repair tips to use. Rather than just focusing on deleting the bad credit you can often make more headway by increasing the positive items showing on your report. You can do this by establishing some new and positive credit. Another consideration is the fact that your debt to available credit ratio is an extremely important factor for your credit score. In order to improve that ratio you can either pay down debt even get your credit limits raised.
The duration of your credit history is also important so make sure that you never close out old accounts because you need that history. And of course, all of your current debts and obligations should be current and avoid more debt if possible. Ironically the highest credit scores belong to the people who have access to credit but don?t ever use it.
You can do credit repair on your own and it is not necessary to hire professional help. However, it can be a time-consuming and even confusing process so a good credit repair company may be advantageous to you, by offering experience and expertise and saving you time and frustration.
If you are suffering with problematic credit you really should look at different credit repair options. It is always to your advantage to have good credit because you never know when you might need it and life is just much easier with good credit and high credit scores.
