Credit Repair Tools

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Having bad credit is problematic for anyone. This becomes evident when the need arises for a loan such as a mortgage. Anyone with credit score bordering on 600 needs to get their credit rating improved. To do this calls for the use of various credit repair tools.

The main areas to be analyzed and worked on to clean up bad or poor credit are:

* Knowing what the three credit reporting agencies have as your credit rating. The big three are Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. Interestingly, they may not all list the same credit score. It is important to request a copy of your credit score from each. Anyone with legitimate reasons to access your credit score may choose one of these agencies. Go through your reports carefully to ensure there are no errors. Any error, no matter how minor should be corrected, as it will impact your overall score.
* Avoid taking on new debts: Once you know your credit rating is bad, stop trying to get additional credit to use for clearing old debts. This will only make a bad situation worse.
* Debt consolidation: this involves getting your debts taken over by one company. ...
... This is useful for those struggling with their monthly payments. With all the bad debts paid, you can be back on your way to credit worthiness as you only have one company to pay.

Three popular tools of credit repair are debt re-aging, debt dispute letters and debt validation. Debt re-aging is done when a collection agency purchases a bad debt and changes the date to the date of purchase. In effect this will cause the debt to remain that much longer on your credit report. When this happens, you can sue, and may even be able to have the debt totally removed from your credit report. The Free Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) states that this is a violation.

Debt dispute letters are useful tools for removing negative information from your credit report. Debtors can write the agency to dispute claims they disagree with. It is advisable that you start with the worst information first, since that would be the most damaging.

Many may think they need to pay someone or an agency to fix their credit problems. This is not so, as it is possible to repair your credit yourself. In fact, there are many online companies that offer credit repair tools. Many of these tools are quite easy to understand. Credit repair regardless of the tools used is the only way to restore good credit.

Avoiding Credit Repair Scams

It is not unusual to see ads by companies claiming to offer tools that can quickly repair your credit. It is easy for someone who is swimming in debt to find these offers attractive. However, many of these companies are simply being misleading.

The only information that can be erased so quickly from your credit report are errors that sometimes end up on financial reports. Correct information remains on a credit report for seven years, while bankruptcy information remains for 10 years. So, this claim of being able to quickly remove bad information is false.

Once you recover from bad credit, you should work to maintain your good credit rating. This calls for developing and maintaining good money management skills. Getting out of debt is not the final solution to using credit repair tools, keeping out of debt is just as important.