Credit Repair Letter - What It Does For You
Filed Under (Finance) by John Cooper on 05-11-2008
Tagged Under : Finance
A credit repair letter is also referred to as a dispute letter. This is a how you remove a negative mark on your credit report with the credit bureaus.
By sending this letter you are telling the credit bureau that the listing is incorrect and should be removed. Upon receipt of this letter the bureaus will conduct an investigation into the listing. Be aware that a separate letter must be sent to each credit bureau.
In your letter you must give the specifics about the listing. This includes why the listing is incorrect and should be deleted. Reasons often include; account is paid in full, item is out of date, reporting the wrong account balance and more.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 bureaus are very resistant to investigations and use stall tactics to hopefully get you to give up on the dispute process. A typical response from the bureaus to a dispute letter is to request more information regarding the mark.
Also you should know that under no circumstances should you ever submit a 100 word statement on your credit report. This is a place where you can provide a brief statement next to a negative mark.
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.
