1) Keep it simple. No need to use fancy language or get into a long heart-breaking story of how your credit got messed up, simply tell the bureau that you think the item is inaccurate, misleading, biased, erroneous, outdated, obsolete, or simply unverifiable—then ask them to verify the item with the creditor.

2) Include everything. A common mistake that is made when sending a credit dispute letter is people will forget to include the information the bureaus needs to be able to open an investigation into the negative credit listing. Be sure to include your full name, address, social security number, and the creditor name and account number for the listing. Without any of the items, the bureau will send you a letter “stalling” the investigation and asking for more information.

3) Have patience. When you send a letter, it will take some time to get to the bureau, be opened, processed, and then (if the bureau does not find your claim “frivolous”) it takes some time to open the investigation with the creditor. Only then does the 30 days begin that the creditor has to respond with the information the bureau is looking for. Once the creditor responds (or the 30 days expires with no respons) the bureau will send an update into the investigation back to you. This entire process make take upwards of 60 days. So, waiting 2 months for a response to your letter is the norm. Check out the credit repair timeline to see how long it takes to get your credit to a satisfactory level.

No, what you get back from the bureaus may be as equally baffling as trying to decipher their reports in the first place. We have a handy guide that shows what the response letters can mean, and what you should do in the aftermath.

No matter what happens, you need to be diligent to repair you own credit. Many people find hiring a Credit Repair firm is their best option, so they can sit back and not have to worry about the process. Click here to find our recommended credit repair service.

It’s sad, but many credit experts actually do not understand that negative items (such as late payments and charge offs) are actually reported to the credit Bureaus by the creditors, and bankruptcies (and other negative items like judgments and liens) are simply reported through public records and can actually be disputed for being misleading, biased or unverifiable. There is no law that says the item *must* stay for 10 years. Anyone who tells you otherwise is misinformed, or lying to you. The law actually states that the item cannot be on the credit report longer than the period of time. But the items can be removed (and often are… see below) for a number of reasons.

How can you dispute a bankruptcy?

Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, any negative item can be disputed for being inaccurate, misleading, unverifiable, biased, or even incomplete. Under any of these circumstances, a consumer can send the bureaus a letter asking them to investigate the negative item (including bankruptcies) and verify the information. If, after 30 days, the credit bureau’s investigation turns up incomplete information from the creditor, or public records, under federal law, the bureau must remove the item.

Does disputing bankruptcies on a credit report get them removed?

In 2010, the nation’s leading Credit Repair law firm, Lexington Law Firm, helped over 16,000 people remove bankruptcies from their Credit Reports. Of course, they’re the experts, and doing it yourself is more of a crap shoot, so we recommend checking out Lexington Law before jumping out on your own. For a free consultation, call 1-800-608-6542 and talk to a credit expert today.

Check out Archer Credit’s Remove Bankruptcy from Credit Report page >

Transcript:

Most people have big hopes when they start out in life. But there are times when life just works against you and you can find yourself in a hopeless situation. Having a lousy Credit Score can feel like there’s nothing you can do.

But you can recover your credit score, and it doesn’t have to take 7 to 10 years like so-called “credit experts” will tell you. Having worked with many Credit Repair agencies, I have seen hundreds of thousands of credit scores go up by using a few simple, tried-and-true methods of repairing your credit. These are legal methods that have been proven time and time again to work.

1) Remove Negative Items

If you want to see the most improvement on your credit score in the shortest amount of time, then remove those stinking negative items! They are a killer to your score and make you look like a deadbeat to any loan officer.

Some people like to take on the system themselves. We have a credit repair guide that shows you how this can be done. We even include a bunch of sample dispute letters to get you started. Just remember to not give up no matter what you get back from the Bureaus.

Some people like to hire a service (the same people who don’t like to change their own oil or mow their own lawn). We have the best credit repair service on the planet right here >

2) Pay Down Your Debt

There’s no getting around this one. A high debt-to-credit ratio will kill your score just about as much as a bankruptcy. There are a bunch of techniques for getting your ratio to look good to a lender’s eyes, but one thing’s for sure, you can’t be maxed out or you can forget about your score looking good.

3) Build Good Credit

This last steps is actually several steps in one. Having a good credit score mean getting a diverse range of accounts, then maintaining them for a long time. These are the smaller parts of a credit score, but they are the important parts if you’re going for perfect credit.

We know a lot of the information on the web makes maintaining a credit recovery look next to impossible, but it doesn’t have to be. We contend that there really are only a few steps that you have to be aware of to keep your score at a respectable level. But the most important thing is to start today!

Our Free Credit Repair Guide covers:

Getting Started -

• Getting Your Credit Reports Online – There are numerous resources, some free, some not. Which one is right for you?
• Understanding Your Credit Reports – It shouldn’t be very difficult to understand your own information, but the Bureaus sure like making it confusing. We break down what they’re *trying* to say.

Taking Action -

• Fixing Your Credit History – It’s the most biggest part of your credit score, and most damaging to your score when you’ve got negative items. What can you do about it?
• Reducing Your Debt - Not the funnest part of credit repair, but extremely important.
• Length of Credit History – how long have you kept your accounts open? Some tips to improving this portion
• Diversifying Your Types of Credit – You can’t just have one type of credit (store cards, revolving lines, etc). So what can you do to improve it?
• Removing Your Credit Inquiries – What’s the difference between hard and soft, and how can you get rid of Inquiries that are damaging that shouldn’t be there?

Getting Results

• Understanding Bureau Letters – What exactly are they telling you with certain types of response letters? We break it down.
• Credit Repair Timeline – How long will this take? We show you typical results and also how long it takes to get perfect credit.

It doesn’t take much to get started, but you do have to be dedicated. Let us show you how by visited our credit score guide.

But nowadays it is almost a necessity to partner with a reputable credit restoration firm that is experienced in improving your clients’ credit scores so that they can be approved for a loan at a decent interest rate. As a seasoned credit repair marketing expert I’ve seen my fair share from the credit repair giants to basement operations. For the mortgage professional, I highly recommend the leaders in financial services credit repair: Credit Unlimited.

Credit Unlimited has based their business around partnering with finance professionals like loan officers and mortgage brokers, creating a team that helps clients go from “unloanable” to “approved” in a matter of months. This not only helps the client, it helps the financial professional to close more loans by allowing them to continue to track the borrower’s credit scores and see when their score has improved to the point that they qualify for their loan.

We also pay a referral fee for every sign up. Many of the professionals that refer clients to Credit Unlimited use the extra money for holiday spending, vacations and paying off bills. A loan officer can get a 20% raise just by referring a credit-challenged borrower to Credit Unlimited. It’s a win-win for everyone.

How do you get started? Simply call toll-free at 1-866-440-6344 (ext. 207). I’ll be happy to help you with your first referral and get you started with a great relationship with an amazing company.

You can also check us out at creditunlimited.com/affiliate

There’s a lot of emphasis put on deleting negative items from your Credit Reports to increase your Credit Score. As there should be. Deleting negative items is the fastest, and quite possibly, easiest way to help you fix your credit and get the score you need to qualify for a loan. Especially if you’re using a credit repair service that knows exactly what they’re doing. And let’s face it. At 35% of your credit score, fixing your negative items is not something you should ignore.

But let’s talk about the next most important part of your FICO credit score: your debt-to-credit ratio (which is 30% of your score). It’s simply how much debt you have compared to how much credit you have available to you. You know, like having a $1,000 line of credit and you’ve used $900 of that. That would put you at a 90% debt-to-credit ratio. Which is bad.

You see, credit lenders and credit Bureaus, and even FICO (pretty much anyone who gives you a credit score) don’t like to see maxed-out credit. They don’t even like to see your debt-to-income ratio above 50%. That’s simply because when people max out their credit, it usually means they’re hurting for cash flow. And that usually means they’re at a higher chance of defaulting on a loan or credit card payment. It’s not always the case, but we live in a world of numbers and creditors don’t see you for the hard-working, real person you are. They see your maxed-out credit line. And so your score plunges.

So, to see a dramatic increase in your score, you need to fix your debt-to-credit ration. And there are several ways to go about this.

1) Pay down your debts. We have a handy snowballing spreadsheet on our Reducing Your Debts page from our credit score guide.

2) Increase your line of credit. It might feel like a cheat, but it works, because the math works. Of course, if you are not ready to commit to stop spending, this might not be the best option for you.

3) Get a new line of credit. The same way that increasing your line of credit works, so does adding another line of credit.

All of these options can be explained more on our Reducing Your Debts page. But no matter how you go about it, sitting around waiting for debts to pay themselves off will do you no good. It’s the boring part of Credit Repair; it really is. But who said this was going to be a day at the park?

Lexington Law Removed 75,001 Late Payments In 2010

How many late payments do you have reporting on your credit report? 1, 3, 5 late payments reporting? Lexington Law removed over 75,000 late payments for their clients last year. That is almost hard to imagine how much Lexington Law has helped Improve Credit scores for their clients.

Call Lexington Law Firm Today at 1-800-608-6543 for a Free Credit Consultation or Sign Up Online.

You can see a full list of negative items removed by Lexington Law on their credit repair results page. See the results of the first quarter of 2011 and see the total amount of negative items that were removed in 2010.

Anyone can dispute late payments themselves, but not one has the experience to say they have removed 75,000 like Lexington. Delete late payments, erase late payments, clean late payments, they can do whatever is needed to get your credit report to where it needs to be by removing your late payments for good.

Let us know if Lexington Law removed a late payment for you below or if you have removed a late payment yourself. We would love to hear from you.