Saturday, November 1, 2008

Credit Repair Letter - What It Does For You

By John Cooper

A credit repair letter is the consumers' method of challenging and removing a negative item from their credit report. This letter is also commonly referred to as a dispute letter.

This letter is you way of telling the credit bureaus that a mark is incorrect. When your letter is received and deemed valid the credit bureaus will start an investigation into the mark. You must send a letter to each credit bureau that is reporting the negative mark.

In your letter you must include the disputed item, the reason for the dispute, your name and address. Common reasons for a dispute are; account is paid in full, not your account, information wrong, item out of date and more.

Congress passed the Fair Credit Reporting Act to help protect you from the credit bureaus. This law forces the bureaus to investigate a dispute and remove any inaccurate or unverifiable listing from your credit report. Consumers had no method of removing a negative item from their credit before this law.

The brick wall that many people face is to get the credit bureau to deem your letter a "valid" dispute. This is because it will only cost the bureaus potential profits to conduct investigations.

Thus credit bureaus use stall tactics and avoid investigations when possible. Often a response to a dispute letter is to request more information, regardless of the need for it. This is an attempt to frustrate you into giving up on the dispute process.

You should also realize that a 100 word statement on your credit report will not help you under any circumstances. This is a place where you can provide a brief statement next to a negative listing.

In past this was a place you could explain the circumstances behind a negative listing such as a sickness in the family, job loss, natural disaster... however now doing this only admits your guilt.

If you do this it will be next to impossible to ever remove this mark from your credit report. The credit bureaus will deem any future dispute letter challenging that mark as frivolous.

Negative listings can be removed; you just need to be persistent and patient. I would suggest looking into a credit repair service if you have multiple negative listings on your credit report.

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