If you have just been turned down by a lender for any kind of loan because of your credit profile, you are probably wondering what to do next. Credit repair might be the answer to your problems. Hopefully, your loan officer has reviewed your credit report with you. Most loan officers will send you a copy if you ask them. At one time, loan officers were not supposed to give out the credit report their company obtained on a customer. This is no longer the case. If you ask your loan officer for your report and they refuse, don’t be offended. They are probably going by the old rule. You might ask them to check with their state bank commissioner to see if it is okay to give a customer a copy of their report. Along with your report, your loan officer should also send you a “Statement of Credit Denial”.
When you have these two documents you can get to work. This is the work that a credit repair company or credit repair attorney would to charge you for. At this point you need to do the following things: 1) Request copies of your free credit reports from the credit reporting agencies, 2) Dispute anything that you find on your credit report that is untrue or inaccurate.
Requesting your free credit reports is easy. (This may seem backwards since you already have a copy that you got from your loan officer; read on.) You simply write a letter to each credit reporting agency requesting a free copy of your report. You have a right to a free copy because you have been turned down for a loan. The addresses of the credit bureaus are at the end of the credit report that you got from your loan officer. Send the request for your free credit reports out first. Even though you got your credit report from your loan officer, you still need to request your free credit reports from each credit reporting bureau so that they create a special file on you. The next task is to write all your dispute letters. This might take you 15 minutes or 5 hours depending on how long your credit report is and how many things you need to dispute. There are a lot of different sample credit repair letters online. If you are unsure how to read your credit report, call your loan officer back and get them to help you. Some credit reports are like code that the loan officer will be accustomed to reading. You then need to create dispute letters for everything on the credit report that you DO NOT think is 100% accurate. The law states that everything on your report must be 100% accurate. If you are unsure if something is 100% accurate then it is your call as to whether or not you want to dispute it. Let the creditor prove they are reporting accurately. You need to dispute each account with each credit score reporting agency that is reporting the account. Not all accounts are going to report to all three credit bureaus. You do not want to dispute something with a credit bureau that is not reporting the account. This work can take a while, but it is not impossible and it is not that difficult. When you consider that credit repair companies charge a lot of money, you will be money ahead to do this on your own. You can use the money you saved to pay off something you really owe or to make a down payment on whatever you are trying to buy. Remember, it is easy to find sample credit repair letters online.
If this process seems a bit daunting, I understand. When I first started helping customers with credit repair I was a bit overwhelmed. You might ask your loan officer if they would help you. Many will and they might even have a tool that will help them do all of this in minutes instead of the hours it is going to take you to do it. There are a few different web sites that have software you can buy which will help you create the dispute letters. The cost is usually $99 – $199 for the software.
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