Has your credit score recently taken a dive and you are finding yourself saying “I need to clean up my credit”? If you are getting started with credit repair, you should understand that it really is nothing more than a systematic process. Like most processes, credit repair works best if you follow the steps. The best place to get started with credit repair is by getting legitimate errors in your credit file corrected.
An estimated 87% of credit reports have errors in them. Of course, most of these errors are not intentional but rather data entry errors. This is especially common if there is someone with a name and social security number that is somewhat similar to yours. Also, very often you have accounts that are so old that they should no longer be reporting to the credit bureaus that are still showing up. Another common credit report issue that you can get corrected is when you have accounts that the creditors failed to substantiate upon request that are still showing up in your credit file. In all of these cases, you should not expect the issues to correct themselves on their own. It is up to you to contact the credit bureaus and work to get your credit report corrected.
You will need to contact each of the credit bureaus, because they are private companies that operate completely independently of each other. This means that it is not enough to correct one of your credit reports, you will need to correct all three individually. This is especially important because most creditors will request “tri-merge” credit reports which gives them all three of your credit scores. This means that an issue with just one of the credit reporting agencies can seriously hurt your ability to get a loan. So, if you are trying to get a bad credit mortgage, repairing all three of your credit reports is critical.
While some credit repair companies suggest that you should challenge every negative account in your credit file, this is generally not a good idea. In fact, you should never challenge more than three or four items at a time because doing so could cause your disputes to be disregarded as frivolous.