The Fair Credit Reporting Act of 1970 is the law that enables you to dispute credit report. This law says:

You can dispute any item YOU feel is inaccurate, the maximum amount of time an item can be on your report is 7 years.

The bureaus must investgate your dispute and remove any items that can not be verified. By disputing and removing bad credit items from the past you will improve your payment history.

If you additionally pay your current bills on time then you will see a huge jump in your overall score as you build a positive payment history (through removing old negative items and building new positive items).

This is roughly 40% of your overall FICO score – your payment history.

What Do I Do?

1. You first need current copies of your credit reports – you need to get your report from each bureau – 3 reports in all.

2. Decide what items YOU feel are inaccurate – an item can be inaccurate for a number of reasons: its not your account, the balance is wrong, the dates are wrong, you don’t know who the lender is, the account is paid …

3. File a dispute – this is a letter that must be sent to each bureau. In your letter you need to include the item you are disputing and the reason for your credit dispute. You can now file an online credit report dispute too – but we advise against this for a number of reasons. Instead stick to snail mail, a few extra days in this process will not make any difference.

4. Investigation Results – when the bureaus deem you dispute valid they will investigate. They will contact the lender and ask them to verify the debt. If it can not be verified then it must be erased from your report. The bureaus will notify you via snail mail on the results of their investigation.

I Though Credit Repair Was Hard?

Credit repair certainly can be difficult, the reason you hear it is difficult or even impossible is because of our credit system. The FCRA forces the bureaus to investigate disputes however the bureaus dont earn any money from investigations.

Don’t They Want Accurate Information?

You would certainly think so, however it really makes no difference. Lenders and businesses are going to buy the information from the bureaus regardless. Therefore the FCRA which forces the bureaus to investigate was and is still a very powerful law.

However because the bureaus have no financial incentive to investigate they have influenced our law makers to water down the FCRA. Now the bureaus must deem your dispute valid before they will investigate.

Unfortunately this is nothing more than a way for the bureaus to fight consumers and their attempts to dispute and correct their credit file. Typcially the bureaus will respond to a dispute letter with another asking for more information.

As we said – this is just an attempt to frustrate you and the goal is to get you to give up and just live with bad credit. You must stay determined and continue on with your efforts. The other option is to hire a professional credit repair company. They can file the disputes and ensure they will be investigated.

You will have the expertise of a credit law firm working for you and at affordable rates. The best service available is Lexington Law Firm. They are a group of 22 expert credit attorneys and over 400 paralegals.

Last year they were able to remove over 1 million bad credit items on their clients credit reports through the credit report dispute process. They are surprisingly very affordable especially when compared to the expensive lifestyle bad credit provides. For a free credit consultation and credit report summary – call 1-800-230-1954.