The One Place You Can Get A Free Credit Report

Most people feel totally helpless when they finally discover or admit they are in financial trouble, or that something is wrong with their credit score.

You may have no idea that you can legally repair your credit and if you are like most, you don’t know the procedures required to obtain, maintain & and re-establish your credit score.

You should check your credit report every year. In an effort to get rid of the mistakes that are popping up on credit reports, the law states you can pull your credit every of the three major credit bureaus. You will want to do this as soon as possible as it the first step to credit repair. You will eventually be looking for inaccurate and/or faulty information as well as potential identity theft that is being reported on your report.

If you are currently having trouble paying your bills, you DO NOT need credit repair, you need to get out of debt.

While you should always try to keep your credit score as high as possible, if you can’t make at least minimum payments, you are going to be accruing late marks faster than you can get them removed. Credit repair while you are getting late payments is pointless.

If you have accounts that are past due, have balances, and/or are in collections, it may be possible to get the accounts removed. However; the accounts will more than likely show back up on your credit report and continue to hurt your score if you do not satisfy the debt in some way, If you have past due accounts with balances, you should consider hiring a settlement company to negotiate the debts, or paying off the accounts in full.

CREDIT REPAIR- Why it works

If you don’t have past due accounts then it’s time to get started. Credit repair works, but you need to be patient and thorough. The reason credit repair works, is because the law states that when an account is disputed, the burden of proof lies on the creditor!

Once a credit bureau receives your dispute letter, they must verify the information you have presented. At that point it’s up to the credit bureau to contact the creditor and ask for proof of the item disputed. When done correctly, in about thirty days after your dispute, you will see the negative items begin to disappear from your credit report. This will happen for several reasons:

Sometimes “they”’ are too busy
If the credit bureau is too busy to verify the information, or if the creditor who is contacted doesn't respond in a certain time frame, the negative items will be removed from your record.

Sometimes “they” are just lazy.
Many creditors will not respond to a credit bureau inquiry simply because it is a bother. Also, if any problems have been corrected in the past, a creditor will show less interest in keeping a negative item on your credit record, and will normally not bother to respond to a written inquiry.

Sometimes “they” can’t find the proof.
Generally, creditors will only maintain credit-account information for two years. Industry experts know that if you challenge an account that is more than two years old, chances are the records won't be available for verification.

When a change is made to your credit report you will receive a new updated credit report in the mail. Check to see what all was removed and you will see that many, if not all, of the negative items you disputed have been removed.

If a negative item doesn’t come off, you will once again repeat the process by challenging the credit bureau's information with denials. This process is usually repeated until all negative items are removed. Sometimes when a creditor receives a second or third inquiry in a short time span, they may think it is a follow-up of an earlier dispute. That, however, is not the case, and if he doesn't respond to each dispute individually, your report has one more item removed. These techniques can place you years ahead in re-establishing your credit.

GETTING A COPY OF YOUR CREDIT REPORT

You can always get a copy of your credit report due to the Fair Credit Report Act. This doesn’t mean you always have to pay for a copy of your credit report. As stated earlier, once a year you are allowed to get a free credit report from each of the three credit bureaus. To get a free copy of your credit report you must got to www.annualcreditreport.com , or call the credit bureaus and request your free annual copy.

You will not get a credit score with your free credit report, unless you pay to receive the score.

The only exception to getting a free annual credit report is if you have been denied credit in the past 30 days. If you have been denied credit within the past 30 days, you are entitled to a free report from the bureau that provided the information to the company with which you were applying for credit. Any other time and will more than likely pay for it unless the creditor pulls it for you.

When you got to www.annualcreditreport.com , you will be asked a series of security questions for EACH report you request. You must request each report INDIVIDUALLT.

Historically for my clients, Transunion is the hardest report to pull, as their security questions are more in depth, and in my situation the answers Transunion has for me must be incorrect. If you can’t access your free report online, pick up the phone, call the bureau, and they will mail you a copy of your report.

When you ask for specific information over the telephone, they will ask for your social security number, date of birth, last two addresses, and other information that will ensure that they will not be releasing information to someone other than you.