Fixing your broken credit is about as enjoyable as cleaning out your sewer lines weeding a briar patch. However, once you finally decide you’ve suffered enough and want to repair your credit, you have a couple of choices.
First, you can do it yourself. Second, you can hire a credit attorney. For all you “do-it-yourselfers” it is mighty tempting to try it on your own. After all, it is much cheaper, right?
Perhaps not. If you are trying to avoid hiring a credit attorney you are probably not considering the real expense, both in resources and time, of attempting to repair your credit yourself. First of all, to be effective youll need to research and understand your legal rights. There are state and federal laws which apply, notably the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA).
If you find legal statutes difficult to read and interpret, then you may struggle through trying to understand what the Federal Government is saying in the credit laws. Even if you do get through all the legal jargon, you will no doubt wasted a few good Saturdays at the library.
Assuming you are able to understand the case law and statutes, then you have to move onto the more important part of credit repair. The next step is to write a coherent and compelling dispute letter. You will need to cite the applicable case law and disputed items.
Specifically, a good credit bureau dispute letter must contain certain elements, and must be silent as to other elements. Your dispute letter will be ignored if not drafted properly. If you write the letter incorrectly, the bureaus will probably throw your dispute in the garbage and you have to start all over.
Assuming you can draft a decent letter, then comes the easy part. The easy part is to mail the letters. You will need to send them certified, which means you have to physically take them to the post office.
Mailing dispute letters via certified mail takes a lot of time. Unless you are unemployed, this is probably not worth your time. Surely you consider your time valuable.
Disputing your credit without the help of an attorney takes a great deal of organization. Assuming you are trying to remove more than a single bad credit item, you will have to stay on top of the progress of your case. To make sure the bureaus or creditors did not ignore your dispute, you will need to create a spreadsheet to track the results of each dispute and negotiation.
As you can see credit repair is not a fun experience. There are so many better and more efficient uses of your time. Plus, it is difficult to learn and apply complex legal statutes and case law to your unique credit experience.
