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The Myth of Easy Credit Report Repair
By: Dylan
Mills
Do a search for credit report repair or navigate through the forums that are popular
with consumer advocates and credit repair specialists and you will likely find more than a
few contributors who claim that fixing your credit reports is a simple process. All that
is required, according to them, is that you get a copy of your credit reports, compose a
dispute letter to the credit bureaus pleading your case, and 30 days later the offending
items on your reports are gone. Your credit score is instantly better and you can make all
of the purchases your heart desires.
Even more, they make it sound like credit report repair is so easy that any person or
company who offers to help you repair your own credit must by trying to bilk you out of
your hard earned money. After all, why would you pay someone to fix your credit when it is
so easy to do it yourself? You might as well start paying people to tie your shoes in the
morning and brush your teeth as well.
The truth is that credit report repair is not as easy as many people claim. If it were,
would it really be necessary for Amazon to list hundreds of books about credit report
repair? If credit repair were so easy, why would the federal government create legislation
to preserve the integrity of the companies offering credit report repair services instead
of just banning the practice altogether?
Why the Credit Bureaus Make Credit Repair Difficult
Understanding why credit repair is not easy and why the process has to be regulated
takes a little understanding of the economics driving the credit bureaus; the main three
of which are Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. To start with and contrary to what many
people believe, credit bureaus are not government entities. They are for profit
corporations that make money by collecting your personal information and selling it to
interested parties. They are regulated by laws created to oversee credit bureaus but they
are not created as a result of legislation.
Being for profit means that the credit bureaus, like any other business, want to focus on
the activities that make them money and streamline or do away with activities that do not
generate revenue. This applies to credit report repair because the credit bureaus do not
make any money off of repairing your credit reports. In truth, if it weren’t for the
fact that they are required by law to investigate consumer disputes, the credit bureaus
wouldn’t even bother with the practice in the first place. For the credit bureaus,
credit report repair is a drain on resources with zero return on investment.
So as a consequence of their economics, the credit bureaus do not want to make it easy for
you to repair your credit but even more than that, no one other than yourself wants you to
remove errors from your credit report. You are not the primary client of the credit
bureaus and until the credit bureaus began selling credit reports directly to consumers (a
service that is only necessary because of credit report errors), the credit bureaus could
not profit from you at all. It is the creditors that the credit bureaus traditionally
profit from and these creditors also do not want you to repair your credit reports. And
why is that? It’s because people with errors on their credit reports have lower
credit scores; low credit scores that are not an accurate representation of who they are
as a lender. This means that creditors can demand a higher interest rate and make more
money from you even though you do not pose a credit risk equal to the risk that your bad
credit score implies.
How the Credit Bureaus Make Credit Repair Difficult
Now that we know why the credit bureaus make credit repair difficult the question is
how? The answer is by using the same laws that have been enacted to allow consumers to
dispute negative items in their credit reports. Credit report legislation states that
consumers are able to dispute any items on their credit reports that they feel are
"inaccurate, unverifiable, or misleading". These vaguely defined terms make it
possible to dispute a lot of items on credit reports, even ones that the consumer knows to
be accurate.
To counter the vague parameters provided to the individual consumers, the credit bureaus
were also provided with even more abstract rules. According to the legislation, the credit
bureaus are required to investigate consumer disputes unless they feel the disputes are
"frivolous or irrelevant" and they take full advantage of this leeway. The
credit bureaus set up "gatekeepers" who accept all consumer disputes and decide
which disputes warrant an investigation, and since these gatekeepers work for the credit
bureaus, they are clearly biased towards the credit bureaus and against you. Getting past
the gatekeepers becomes the largest hurdle in credit report repair and frequently devolves
into a trial and error process of writing letters, waiting, fielding rejections or stall
letters, and starting all over again.
Easy Credit Report Repair
Credit report repair can still be an easy process from your perspective; it just
requires a simpler allocation of resources. Instead of spending resources in the form of
time and effort, you can spend a little money to have an expert repair your credit for
you. What’s more, just like when you pay professional installers to replace your
carpeting instead of performing the process yourself, you will end up with a better
finished product in less time.
Professional credit report repair is easy. It is simply a matter of getting your credit
reports, providing them to a credit repair agency, selecting which items on your report
you want to dispute, and letting them manage the process from there.
There are a number of quality credit report repair companies available with the leading in
the credit repair industry being Lexington Law. Lexington operates as a fully licensed law
firm and has been honing the craft of credit report repair (getting past the gatekeepers)
for over 15 years. For more information about Lexington Law, visit their site directly by
browsing to www.lexingtonlaw.com.
Article Source: http://www.articlerich.com
Dylan Mills is a contributor to www.creditoptions.com">Credit
Options and numerous other credit repair focused sites. To read more about www.creditoptions.com/credit-repair/">credit repair and other credit related topics, visit www.creditoptions.com">www.creditoptions.com
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