Most of the major purchases we make throughout our life will be affected by our credit scores, which will determine the prices we pay. Saving money on your mortgage loan and contributing to a comfortable retirement may be as easy as managing your credit wisely.
Three Tips for Repairing Your Credit Report
1. Designate your preference to not receive any credit bureau solicitations. Your information is sold to solicitors by credit bureaus without your permission.
The companies that buy your information are trying to get you to have even more credit card debt and are the ones that are sending you all those “fake” checks that are designed to trick you into thinking you are already “pre-approved”, or that somehow you are getting free money.
A little-known fact is that credit bureaus have to stop selling your private information if you tell them to. In fact, the credit bureaus’ automatic scoring system sees this as a responsible thing for you to do and actually raises your credit score when you contact them to tell them to stop selling your information. This can possibly raise your credit score by 3-10 points in just a week by simply exercising your right to “opt-out” of this practice.
The website to do this is located at: www.optoutprescreen.com
2. It is important that you review the information on your credit report on a regular basis, which requires that you get a copy of the report. The credit bureau report will be your blueprint if you are serious about cleaning up your credit.
The information contained in your credit report, and reflected in your FICO® Score, though constantly changing, is intended to give the lender a snapshot of your borrowing and repayment history at a particular moment in time into consideration as part of your overall financial picture.
Always get and review your credit reports, which you can do at no cost to you at www.AnnualCreditReport.com.
Once you receive your credit report, you need to confirm that ALL of the debts reported by collection agencies belong to you. Since the credit bureaus must remove these by law, look for debts that are older than 7 years old, starting from the charge-off date. You need to dispute the debts with the credit bureau directly, not the collectors.
The next thing that you need to do is check for duplicate collections, as many times when an agency sells your debt to another company they fail to remove their original report. To request the removal of a debt from your report, you need to send a letter to the credit bureaus explaining why you are disputing the item.
3. Dispute ALL credit bureau debt – Dispute all negative remarks, late payments, and collections that appear, not with the collection agencies but with the 3 credit bureaus. You should clearly state that the debt is not yours, and request that the reporting agency prove that it is yours, or else remove it. This is no different than walking into a court of law and pleading “Not Guilty”. You have the absolute right to do this.
When disputing items, dispute every negative item whether real or not. An agency must let you know about the debt owed in a reasonable amount of time or they must remove the remark on your bureau in accordance with the law.
The requests of the credit bureau are often not responded to because of the heavy workload of many collection agencies. If this is the case, the credit bureaus are required to remove the negative remarks whether they are legitimate or not.
Should you have a dispute you can contact the credit reporting agencies directly:
Equifax: (800) 685-1111, www.equifax.com
Experian: (formerly TRW): (888) 397-3742, www.experian.com
TransUnion: (800) 888-4213, www.transunion.com
Saving $$$ on the average mortgage loan may be as simple as improving your credit score by 50 points. It’s also likely that you’ll find yourself paying higher rates for car loans and other types of credit so you could be looking at a rather large amount of money. Wouldn’t it be amazing if you could put all of that money in a retirement fund?
Ideal Lending LLC is not a credit repair agency and provides no credit repair services. Ideal Lending LLC is not acting on behalf of or at the direction of the federal government, and this offer is not being made by an agency of the government.
