Although there are a million and one services out there, especially on the Internet, claiming to be able to repair your credit for you, in reality you can do most of this yourself. Believe it or not, there are strong consumer protections created by law that allow the average person to repair their own credit. The services may be useful for people that are not interested in doing the work themselves, but if you are willing to do so, you can in fact repair your own credit for free.
The crux of the matter is education. Many people prefer to hire a professional rather than learning what they need to know to do things themselves; this is true for credit repair as well. Many people turn to professionals to have their credit repaired. Nevertheless, a credit repair company will charge a fee. If you have free time on your hands then it would be wise to consider repairing your own credit.
Admittedly, learning how credit and credit reporting works can be rather boring and tedious, but it can also save you a decent amount of money. Through just a simple search on the Internet, you can find an enormous amount of resources that can walk you through the process and detail what options are available to you. There are certainly some options that require professional assistance, such as negotiating debt settlements or any kind of legal filing, like a bankruptcy. Nevertheless, basic free credit repair, just to improve your FICO scores is easy enough.
Further, doing your own free credit repair allows you to avoid being scammed. The sad fact of the matter is, many services offering basic credit repair can only really do the same things you can do yourself. Being aware of this, they will often ask you to pay their fees up front and usually in cash, with no guarantee as to what they will actually do. Often, after collecting their fee, they will ask you to review your credit report for errors. After doing so they will contest these errors with the credit reporting agencies and if it is determined that this was an error the item will be removed from your credit report. This is the entire process, all they will do for you.
This is the same thing you can easily do for yourself. You can order a free copy of your credit report from each of the "Big Three' bureaus, Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion, by visiting the Annual Credit Report website ( www.annualcreditreport.com). Each year, you are entitled to a free copy of your report. Once you have your reports review them for errors. If there are errors visit the credit reporting agency's website where you will find a form to contest the errors. The procedure is easy and in the end you have done exactly the same thing that some credit repair agencies would collect fees for.
It would take large amounts of time and effort to become an expert at credit and credit repair. When basic credit repair is so simple you certainly do not need help from a service. Chances are that if your credit score is causing your problem then you probably need to hold onto every penny. Spending money on basic credit repair is not necessary and it is something you can easily do yourself.
Wendy Polisi is
the founder of Credit Repair College, a weekly video training series that
empowers people to learn how
to fix credit on their own.
For more information on fixing bad credit ,
please visit her on the web.
Disclaimer: All information on this site is provided for informational purposes only! By no means is any
information presented herein intended to substitute for the advice provided to you by any health care or other professional
or organization.
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