Regardless of your track record or credit history, you can take some simple steps and do your own credit repair. You can begin right away, and it won’t cost you anything – but the improvement can be gigantic!

To start, you’ll need to get a copy of your credit reports and actually go through them. There are three separate credit reporting bureaus and each one will have a slightly different report.

The law now provides consumers the right to one free credit report from each of the bureaus, Experian, TransUnion, and Equfax. You are entitled to one from each company every year.

There is a website set up by the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) specifically for this purpose: annualcreditreport.com. Be leery of any other sites claiming free credit reports – there will be strings & fees attached.

You can begin your credit repair efforts once you have your reports in hand. You will want to go through them carefully, line by line.

The reports will either include a “dispute” form, or give you a web address where you can download them. This is where you will begin fixing your credit score.

Make a note of each and every entry that is either incorrect, outdated, or inaccurate. For each of these, you will be filing a dispute. You will want to list why the entry should be removed, such as a debt that has already been paid but hasn’t yet been removed.

By federal law, the credit reporting bureaus have up to 30 days to verify each dispute. If they don’t do so, or don’t do it within the 30 days, they must remove those entries from your credit report.

With just this simple step, some of these negative entries will be removed from your credit report. They will no longer contribute to a low credit score, and your score will immediately go up – sometimes by hundreds of points!