| By :
Jim Kemish
Getting Your Credit Reports Your credit repair job will start with your reports. Most people are aware of their right to get free reports, one from each bureau, one time per year. Unfortunately, these individual reports are not ideal if you are planning a comprehensive credit report clean up. They are in three different, mostly obscure, formats. For credit repair you are better off buying a user oriented tri-merged report. It will save a headache. Reviewing Your Reports the Right Way There is little use in limiting your credit repair effort to a cursory examination. A superficial review of your reports will yield little except a waste of your time. It matters, so do it right. Get a highlighter, take your time and find everything that looks even slightly odd. Even innocuous looking errors can ding your scores, and they all add up. Leave nothing on the table. Managing the Dispute Progression Once you have made your list it is time to send dispute letters to the bureaus. There are three major credit bureaus and they must be treated individually. They each use unique identifying account information and will process your credit repair dispute letters in their own way. Do not use the same letter for each bureau. Keep copies of your letter and be prepared to send your disputes until you are satisfied. Building New Credit for Results A nice clean credit report is a wonderful thing, but in the final analysis, it is your FICO score that will open doors for you. No credit repair effort is complete without opening new accounts. If you will not be approved for regular credit cards, get two secured credit cards as soon as you can. Use them each month, pay them on time, keep the balances low, but do not let them go to zero. FICO and Limiting Your Card Usage It cannot be emphasized enough that you must watch your credit card balances very carefully. If your account balances tip over the 80 percent capacity utilization level your FICO scores will plummet, as much as 100 points. Your credit repair program should include reducing balances until your accounts utilize less than 20 percent of their available limit. Final Credit Repair Tips for Your Consideration Your credit report is alive. Your balances and payment history are constantly updated, and creditors are constantly reporting new information. It is in your best interest to monitor the activity on your reports. This is especially important after completing your credit repair effort. It is conceivable that some creditor will reverse a correction, or that a new collector will surface with an old defunct debt that you thought was long gone. These things may never happen, but it is wise to remain vigilant. A credit monitoring service will be able to email you in the event of any material change in your file, from late payments to inquiries. If anything does occur, an early warning should allow you to fix the problem before it gets entrenched. Copyright © 2010 James W. Kemish. All Content. All Rights Reserved.
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