Keep Your Personal Credit Report Clean |
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Your past payment history is evaluated by
mortgage lenders from the three credit bureaus and credit card companies.
Therefore to clean up your personal credit report, your objective needs to be cleaning up with the three bureaus. Doing it with only one of the three will make no difference to the other two bureaus. Errors may be noticed in one or more of your personal credit report or for that matter, actual details of late payments and debt-related problems. Don't be alarmed as errors can be corrected. Even some of the negative entries could possibly be removed without taking help of companies promising credit repair. Negative Entries: Bankruptcies reflect on your personal credit report for at least ten years with lesser offences remaining for seven years. Any previously past due account that has been made current for at least a year or been paid off, can be deleted early if the creditor agrees to do so. Write to your creditor to request removal of negative entries. Though there is no assurance of it, in most cases they to oblige provided your payments are up to date and your record is positive. Another option is to contest a negative item despite the knowledge that it is accurate. You just have your conscience to overcome for it. Mistakes on your personal credit report: Your personal credit report is likely to have some mistake on almost every entry, no matter how minor. The accuracies don't require acknowledgement but the inaccuracies certainly do. Write the problem next to each disputed entry very briefly and make a request for a copy of the revised report in thirty days. If 30 days pass without any response, write again. The second letter should also include a copy of your original letter with a firm request for removal of the disputed entries. A cc to the Federal Trade Commission should be included as well. How To Dispute Errors On Your Personal credit report Get a copy of your personal credit report with every disputed item circled. Write an accompanying letter to the reporting agency whose address is printed on the report. --Elaborate on each inaccuracy requesting an investigation into them. --If possible, include supporting documents, with coding pages to mark disputed entries. Keep the originals with you safely. --Use certified mail for sending the relevant documents requesting a return receipt as evidence that the package was received and send a similar letter to the creditor responsible for the disputed item. --Billing statements mostly include a special mailing address for disputes. The dispute may involve personal details like place of employment and current address. --The employment issue can be taken care of, with a copy of a pay stub. For address verification, copies of driver's license or utility bill with your name will suffice. The reporting agency will then carry out an investigation to verify the accuracy of the information from your creditors. Should the creditor be unable to verify the authenticity of the entry, it will be removed. On completion of the investigation, the agency is required to send you a personal credit report in case of any changes or alterations. If errors are encountered during the investigation, you are entitled to demand a corrected version of your personal credit report to be sent to all recipients of the report in the last six months. An investigation can be started from your online personal credit report. It's all about intuition where links are followed and disputed items are checked as instructed. Remarks cannot always be accommodated as most of it involves multi-choice options for the disputes. However should the agency manage to verify the authenticity of disputed items on your personal credit report, it needs to send you a written notice mentioning the name, address and phone number of the provider. You can still disagree and investigate all over again. Should you fail to correct an entry, the reporting agency can be asked to make provision for a 100-character explanation next to the entry with your version. |
