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Credit repair organizations
The most reliable help for restoring credit will come from Father Time. There really is no way to "repair" a credit report when the negative information on it is accurate – except through the passage of time.
Bringing your payments up-to-date and keeping them current is the best advice I can give you. Eventually, the negative information on your credit report will be deleted, and only the positive information will remain.
In the meantime, don't lose hope. You still may be able to obtain credit. As soon as you pay your debts, you begin to rebuild your credit history. Adding a string of on-time payments will counter those old delinquencies.
After a year or two of keeping your account payments current, get a copy of your credit report and talk to your creditors about it. They may be willing to extend you credit based on the responsibility and reliability you will have shown since overcoming your financial problems.
So-called "credit repair clinics" may charge you more than $1,000 for their services, but you can do for free everything that they can do legally.
In fact, such businesses are regulated by federal laws because of questionable past practices such as:
- telling consumers to change their identity when applying for credit. (Consumers who followed this advice committed fraud.)
- advising consumers to dispute accurate information. (Consumers who did this broke the law.)
- going out of business and reopening under another name. (This often cost clients of out-of-business clinics hundreds of dollars with no results.)
- requiring consumers to sign contracts, then turning the accounts over to collection agencies when the consumers didn't pay. (So much for "repairing" credit.)
In addition to hurting their own clients, credit repair clinics cause inconvenience and delays to all consumers.
For example, credit grantors have to ask for more proof when you have a real fraud situation. They have no way of knowing you are not just another credit clinic case trying to remove accurate information by claiming fraud.
Credit clinic clients inundate credit bureaus with redundant and frivolous credit disputes. In fact, credit bureaus estimate that as many as 40 percent of all disputes come from these clients. That takes away the time and attention credit bureaus can devote solving the problems of consumers with legitimate disputes.
If you find inaccurate information on your Experian credit report, we'll be happy to help you remove it. With each credit report we provide, Experian includes instructions on how to dispute inaccurate information.
You certainly don't need to invest hundreds or thousands of dollars to correct inaccurate information on your credit report. Your only cost may be for a postage stamp.
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Credit education
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