Many consumers are completely stressed out these days because their high interest rate credit card debt and their ever decreasing incomes dont seem to add up at the end of the month. This leaves many people in the lurch and can push them into ruining their credit scores. Its not that hard to ruin your credit, even if you have had years and years of spotless or nearly impeccable payment history. All it takes is a couple of 30 day lates to drop your score considerably. If you are like a lot of Americans these days, you have even more to worry about than a couple of 30 day lates. Home foreclosures are at all time record highs across the country and credit scores have plummeted across a wide swath of the American buying public. This has led to tighter credit restrictions by banks and the veritable end of sub-prime lending as we knew it. Even people with great credit are having difficulty getting home loans. Just try it with bad credit and you will find that it just cant be done.
There are several techniques that you can use to accomplish bad credit credit repair. First though you need to thoroughly understand the process of credit and credit scoring. Lending institutions use your credit score as calculated by the three major credit reporting agencies to give out grades or scores. The credit reporting agencies use something called a FICO score which you may have heard about. FICO stands for Fair Isaac and Company and they invented the current system that is in use today. FICO scores start at 400 and go to over 900 points. A FICO score of over 800 is improbable and 700 to 720 is considered A plus credit by most lending institutions and banks.
You can get a free copy of your credit report by requesting a copy from each of the three credit reporting agencies. By law they have to provide you with a copy when you request it in writing or on their website. You can also get one by registering with www.freecreditreport.com or several other similar sites. Be careful though because they will ask for your credit card and could start debiting for automatic monthly payments after the trial period. You need to call in before the trial period is over in order to cancel the membership if you do not want to be charged. These sites have some great information on them and it is recommended that you read through all of their articles and FAQ pages. These will answer most questions that people have on bad credit credit repair.
Once you receive your free credit report, you need to find the negative items on the report. Sometimes this is not so easy to see and you have to be patient and read through the report carefully. You can then go to the credit reporting agency websites themselves and actually dispute items online. The three major credit reporting agencies are Equifax (www.equifax.com), Transunion (www.transunion.com) and Experian (www.experian.com). In order to perform bad credit credit repair you will need to dispute any negatively reported items that you think were erroneously reported. Once you click off which items you want to dispute on your credit report, the credit reporting agency will place that item in dispute and ask the creditor (credit card company) to check their records and make sure the negative item is not an error. Creditors usually have just 30 days to respond to these queries. If they do not respond in time, the credit reporting agencies are required to remove the negative items.
This is probably the quickest way of performing bad credit credit repair that is currently available without hiring an outside third party expert.
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