Remove All Negative Entries From Your Credit Report |
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The concept of credit repair is assuming
increasing importance for people suffering from bad credit. A bad credit report can be a real curse on your financial life as it badly affects your standing in the market. It disqualifies you from availing most of the standard loans and that dream car or beautiful house would remain just a pipe dream. You can undertake your credit repair on your own, which is a better idea. But often enough when consumers are not confident, it is easy for them to fall for catchy advertisements of the credit repair companies. Attention grabbing punch lines like "Make bad credit extinct" and "Credit repair for $100" bombard consumers these days through the media. But you can afford to believe in them at your own peril. We will try to explain here what all is possible through the help of the credit repair companies and what is not. The relevant federal and state laws will also be discussed. We will also guide you as to how to remove any inaccurate information from your credit report. Details regarding procuring alternative free or low cost credit assistance will also be provided. We will also tell you about the precautions you should take before signing a contract with a credit repair company. There are some favorable laws that protect the consumer interests, namely, the FTC's Fair Credit Reporting Act. The law regulates the information reported by credit bureaus and sees to it that no inaccurate or outdated information finds its way into the consumer's credit report. You can use this law to your advantage without having to resort to the services of a credit repair company. For this same thing a credit repair company would charge you anything from $ 15 to hundreds of dollars. They often make misleading claims like they can fix your credit record even if you have recently suffered credit denial because of a faulty credit history, or they even claim to make that negative information disappear from your credit report. The stock in trade of the credit repair companies is to manipulate the consumer's right to dispute to make the negative information temporarily disappear from the credit report. The companies either do the disputation on your behalf or goad you on to do it. The usual strategy is to dispute left, right and center so as to overwhelm the credit bureau into removing all the disputed information. When the credit bureau gets bombarded with all the accurate or inaccurate disputations to be thus investigated, they are obliged to remove the information for lack of sufficient time at their disposal to investigate their veracity. But this strategy of the credit repair companies only flatters to deceive. The disputed information, unless proved incorrect, is very likely to resurface on your credit report. During the time the disputed information is absent from the credit report, the credit bureaus carry on investigating. The accurate information will reappear upon the completion of the investigation and there is no way a credit repair company or anyone can wipe it off your credit record until the stipulated period has expired. Sometimes a credit repair company resorts to advising their client to do away with the old record and open an altogether new account under the provision of file segregation This would oblige you to get an Employer Identification Number (EIN), something that businesses need to report to the IRS (Internal Revenue Service). That could also mean changing to a new mailing address and phone number on your credit applications. This would hide your true identity and you can supposedly start with a clean slate. But such a credit repair strategy is illegal to say the least. The IRS deems it illegal and a crime as it forms a case of fraudulent misrepresentation. It is advisable that you know the regulations laid down by the FTC for governing the credit repair companies. If you do want the help of a credit repair company, you need to be very selective about it. But it is a better idea to do it on your own. You would thus save precious money and time and avoid committing some crime inadvertently. |
