Regardless of your record or history, there are a number of quick & easy steps you can take towards credit repair. It’s never too late, and costs nothing, yet the results can be huge!

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.

By law, consumers are entitled to one free credit report from each of the these agencies, TransUnion, Experian, and Equifax. You can get one from each agency, each 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’ll start your credit repair efforts as soon as you get your reports. To begin with, you want to read each report line by line.

These reports will either include a “dispute” form, or give you a web address to get them. This is the key where you will begin to fix your credit.

Make a note of each and every entry that is either incorrect, outdated, or inaccurate.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.

Each credit reporting agency has up to 30 days to either verify the information, or they must remove it by law. Even if the information is accurate, if they don’t verify it in time, it gets removed.

By taking this simple step, you will find some of those negative entries will come off your credit report, and as such no longer contribute to a low credit score. In some cases, this can boost your score by hundreds of points!

Tags: Credit Score