Are You Really Capable of Doing Your Own Free Credit Repair?

People are often skeptical of doing their own free credit repair. In theory, it sounds great to fix bad credit for free. In practice, they fear that it takes special skills.

My $2.99 eBook on free credit repair is designed to debunk that myth. It takes only four simple steps to fix bad credit for free, and if you can read and write a letter, there's no need to pay anyone for credit repair.

Obviously, you need a computer internet connection to order your free annual credit reports. Once you get them, it's a matter of reading them and finding things to dispute. Then you write your letter, and you don't even have to do it from scratch. My eBook has as example, and you can find many others online. Mail the letters, wait for the results. and repeat the process once a year by reordering and checking your free annual credit reports every 12 months.

Really. That's all it takes to repair bad credit for free yourself.

Paying Up Front for Credit Repair is Illegal

Paid credit repair companies often make extravagant claims. They promise everything from erasing every bad item from your credit reports to creating entirely new reports. None of this is legal, and it's usually not possible to do permanently even if they use illegal methods. You can even get in trouble legally and with the IRS if you go along with some of their methods for getting a new credit identity.

The worst part of unscrupulous credit repair companies who promise to fix bad credit for a price is that they often demand money up front. That's illegal, according to the Federal Trade Commission. Legitimate companies must repair your credit first, then bills you. Sure, companies that want up-front pay might give you a money-back guarantee, but promises are worthless when you try to get your money back and the company disappears. My $2.99 eBook tells you how to fix your own bad credit for free. There's no need to pay for credit repair and run the risk of dealing with a scammer. Buy the book for Kindle and do the job yourself. All you'll pay for his postage, and your credit repair will be done the proper, legal way.

Free Annual Credit Reports: Don't Be Fooled

Only one website, www.annualcreditreport.com, truly offers free credit reports with no catches or requirements. Other websites that offer free reports want to sell you something or sign you up for memberships. The real site is mandated by federal law, and the three credit bureaus have to give you free credit report copies through it without forcing you to sign up or order anything else.

How can you tell if you're at the right website? You should always use the URL www.annualcreditreport.com. If you accidentally visited another website, one big clue is that it will likely ask you for a credit card number and expiration date for the required order or trial membership. Your card will be billed for whatever the site made you buy, or you'll rack up monthly charges when the trial membership is over. The real free annual credit report website doesn't make you enter a credit card number because it's not selling you anything. It will make you verify your identity through your Social Security Number and verification questions.

My Kindle book on free credit repair tells more about ordering and using your free credit reports to fix bad credit. Repair your credit for free at least once a year by getting and checking your free credit reports and using them to dispute bad items.

Secured Credit Cards May Help Fix Bad Credit

Sometimes bad credit items stay on your credit reports despite your best efforts to fix your credit (I detail the best method credit repair methods in my $2.99 Kindle book on free credit repair). You dispute bad items with mistakes, but the lenders somehow manage to verify the data to the credit bureaus' satisfaction, which means they stay on your credit reports. What else can you do to repair bad credit? Paying your current bills on time helps, but you can't rebuild a good payment record if you don't have any accounts. That's where secured credit cards come in.

You guarantee secured credit cards by making a bank deposit. The issuer makes your credit line the same as your deposit, with the right to seize the money if you default. This guarantee makes secured credit cards accessible even if your credit is very bad. Make sure you get your secured card from a bank that reports it to TransUnion, Experian, and Equifax. It won't help if your payment history doesn't go on your credit reports. Get your free annual credit reports to make sure your secured accounts are there. As you pay them regularly, your good credit builds and opens up possibilities for unsecured credit lines.

The Only One Who Looks Out For Your Credit is You

Your credit report makes or breaks your ability to get loans, and sometimes even jobs. The information that TransUnion, Equifax, and Experian add to your records carries a lot of weight. Wrong items with negative information can get you reject for everything from a small loan or new credit card to a car loan or mortgage. Surely there's some oversight for something so important, right? Surely the credit bureaus have a program in place to catch and remove errors, right?

No, they don't.

As scary as it sounds, the credit bureaus add information to your credit reports continually without ever verifying it. No law requires to them check out information before they add it to your credit records. Your only protection comes from your right to free annual credit reports and your ability to dispute things on those credit reports. That's why it's so important to check your records regularly and fix bad credit caused by mistakes. Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), the credit bureaus have to take action once you notify them of errors with a credit report dispute. My credit repair ebook for Kindle explains much more about this process for only $2.99 (free to Amazon Prime members).

Your Credit Repairs Itself in Seven Years

Bad credit hurts you in many ways, lowering your credit score and causing credit application rejections. Often you can remove a lot of bad credit from your credit reports by finding items with mistakes and disputing them. Sometimes you can't fix bad credit completely, and you're stuck with negative items.

Fortunately, most bad credit entries on your credit reports can only appear for a limited time. The vast majority of negatives, like late payments, defaults, charge-offs, judgments, collection agency accounts, repossessions, and foreclosures get removed automatically after seven years. Bankruptcy stays on your credit reports between seven and ten years.

When checking your free annual credit reports, don't just look for mistakes in the individual items. Look for anything over seven years old and dispute the old negative items. Getting rid of them gives you an immediate benefit. Learn more about credit repair for only $2.99 with my comprehensive eBook (free to Amazon Prime members).

Charge-Offs and Collections

Charge-offs and collections are two very different things. The same account can give you two bad credit entries on each of your three credit reports if the lender charges it off, then tells it to a collection agency. The original account shows that it's charged off, which is very bad for your credit score. The debt collector adds a collection account that harms you even more.

You can sometimes fix bad credit that involves charge-offs and collection accounts by finding disputable mistakes. Debt collectors sometimes buy large portfolios of bad debt accounts for pennies on the dollar. They don't have proper documentation, so the credit report entry has some sort of mistake. You can challenge it, and the collection agency won't have the proper information to validate it. Now your credit is repaired, at least partially, because the collection account is erased for lack of validation. This process is covered in depth, with easy to follow steps, in my $2.99 Kindle book on free credit repair (the book is free to Amazon Prime members).

The original account is trickier, but it's not impossible that you'll someday find a wrong date, amount, spelling, or something else in the charge-off entry that gives you the right to legally file a dispute. Remember, disputes are free, and you're entitled to free annual credit reports, so it never hurts to check. Read my book if you're not sure how to fix your credit for free yourself.

Your Opportunities for Free Credit Repair Are Unlimited

You can fix bad credit for free, and don't only get one shot at it. Free credit repair can happen as often as you wish, since you're not limited in the number of disputes you can file with the Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion credit bureaus.

You only get free annual credit reports once a year under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), but that doesn't mean you can't get your credit reports from other sources. You're entitled to a free credit report whenever you're turned down for credit. The credit bureaus and other companies sell copies of your credit reports. Whenever you get a report and find a mistake, you're allowed to dispute it. Every error in a negative item means another chance to fix your credit by disputing it and getting it erased.

This doesn't mean you should file a dispute every few weeks, even though you have that power. The FCRA lets the credit bureaus refuse to investigate disputes that they deem frivolous. Making a flurry of constant disputes is a good way to lose your credibility. Limit yourself to fixing your credit every few months, and make sure every bad credit item you dispute has a real mistake in it, even if the error is very small. This ensures that your credit report disputes will get investigated, meaning more potential erasures of the bad items.

The self credit repair process is easy. Click here for my $2.99 Kindle book that walks you through how to fix your credit for free.

Why You Need to Order All Three of Your Credit Reports for Credit Repair

You have three credit reports, compiled by three separate credit bureaus. Equifax, TransUnion, and Experian are all separate businesses. Each one gathers its own data and compiles its own credit reports. In theory, your credit reports at all three bureaus should be the same if they're all reporting the data accurately. In reality, there can be differences caused by mistakes and other factors. One of your credit reports might show you have an excellent credit rating, while the others might show mediocre or even bad credit because they contain inaccurate information.

Fortunately, the Fair Credit Reporting Act, or FCRA, gives you the right to one free credit report per year from all three credit bureaus, as long as you order your free annual credit reports from the www.freeannualcreditreport.com website. Ordering free credit reports from any other website means you'll either have to pay for them or sign up for some type of product or service to get them.

Get all three of your credit reports when you're doing free credit repair for yourself. You need to fix bad credit on all three reports. Otherwise, you never know which credit report a lender will pull when you fill out an application. If you have one report with negative items, it can get you denied.

You don't need to pay anyone to repair bad credit for you. You can fix bad credit yourself very easily and get results within 60 days. If you're not familiar with the process, my $2.99 Kindle eBook gives you all the steps you'll need to fix bad credit. It's free if you're an Amazon Prime member. Click here to go to Amazon and read an excerpt from the book, which gives you four simple steps for free credit repair.

Are Free Credit Reports Really Free?

If you believe TV ads, getting a free credit report is as simple as visiting a website. Actually it is, but not through the websites plugged on TV. Those sites lure you in, and they do give you free credit reports, but only if you sign up for credit-related services like credit report monitoring, identity theft protection, or something else that adds monthly charges to your credit card. This practice is so common that the Federal Trade Commission made its own commercials to offset the free credit report ads. The FTC ads explain that the only real free credit report site, with no catches, is www.annualcreditreport.com. You can see one of the ads below:



The www.annualcreditreport.com website provides the free credit reports mandated by federal law. The three credit bureaus (Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax) are legally obligated to give you free credit report copies every year, and www.annualcreditreport.com is the place to get them. You can't get your free credit reports directly from the credit bureau websites.

Why should you get your free credit reports every year? They're essential for doing free credit repair. You don't need to pay anyone to repair bad credit for you. You can fix bad credit yourself very easily and get results within 60 days. If you're not familiar with the process, my $2.99 Kindle eBook gives you all the steps you'll need to fix bad credit. It's free if you're an Amazon Prime member. Click here to go to Amazon and read an excerpt from the book, which gives you four simple steps for free credit repair.

You can't erase bad credit from your records completely, but you can often get rid of quite a few negative items if you use your free credit reports and smart dispute tactics like those discussed in my book.