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Negative listings on your credit reports have some of the biggest effects on your credit rating. A few late payments can make the difference between getting a good interest rate on a mortgage or other type of loan and having to make a large down payment in order to even qualify for financing. Major blemishes like charge-offs, liens, and bankruptcies have the potential to drop your credit score so much that you will have difficulty getting approved for credit at all. So what are the options when there are negative items on a credit report that should not be there? Credit reporting mistakes do happen and damaging listings are incorrectly added to peoples' credit reports all the time. And what about negative listings that do describe actual events but there was a legitimate reason behind them? Is it fair to have to live with a low credit rating for up to a decade when the damaging listings on your credit reports were essentially out of your control? The Fair Credit Reporting Act provides consumers with a few options when dealing with poor credit, and enforcing their right to a fair and accurate credit score. This includes your right to order free copies of your credit reports so you can see what information they contain as well as the right to dispute items on your credit reports that you feel may be inaccurate, untimely, misleading, incomplete, ambiguous, unverifiable, biased or unclear. Another antiquated option you have as a result of the Fair Credit Reporting Act is the ability to add a 100 word statement to your credit reports explaining to creditors the circumstances behind negative items on your credit reports. The idea is that when referencing your credit reports, lenders will be able to take into account the justification behind these negative listings when considering a loan application. What makes this statement antiquated is that these days, lenders rarely consider the individual listings in your credit reports. In fact, they may never see your reports at all so your meticulously crafted 100-one hundred word statements would never even be read. On top of that, lenders are most interested in your credit score, which does not take the 100 word statement into account. No matter how good your justification is for having negative listings on your credit reports, your credit score will remain unchanged. The only way to prevent negative items from lowering your credit score is to have them removed from your credit report. One option people have for attempting to do this is the credit bureau dispute described in the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Additional credit repair options are made available through a number of other consumer protection acts targeted towards creditors and collections agencies.
Credit Repair Thoughts: http://www.creditrepairthoughts.org
For over 18 years, Lexington Law has been helping credit repair clients legally dispute the questionable negative items in their credit reports. Lexington Law's credit repair services have assisted clients with the removal of millions of these negative listings. See LexingtonLaw.com for more information.
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