Fact and fiction about consumer debt relief

Try These Credit Restoration Ideas


For people who have bad credit, trying unsuccessfully to get new credit, <A HREF=”http://credit-help-online.com/blog/easiest-credit-restoration-tips/” TARGET=”_blank”>credit restoration</A> could be a important hurdle to deal with.  Once you’ve damaged your credit report score, it can take many months or years to restore your credit, and rebuild it back to a good credit score.  The fact is there are steps toward credit restoration which anyone with bad credit can follow to restore credit, but it still requires patience.  Here are ideas you can use.

In the event that your credit score has been hurt as a result of late payments, the best thing you can do is to go back to making all of your payments on time.  Even one delinquent payment can damage your score.  The hardest problem individuals have however is finding it hard to keep up with all of their bills, as a result of factors such as adjusted home mortgage payments, increases in expenses for food, health care, utilities and other expenses. For some, this is compounded by low wages or unfortunately job loss.  So if you’re falling behind on making monthly payments due to financial hardship, rather than a one-time oversight, you could have to take major steps to bring your payments up to date.  In some cases you may have to take more serious credit repair efforts to get your lenders to modify their payment schedule.

You might be thinking, should I use a credit repair company to help my credit restoration?  Most often no, at least not at the beginning.  Most borrowers can manage things like working with credit card companies to get a lower interest rate or some other efforts like putting together a payment plan.  Generally the best thing to do is work with lenders to bring payment current and then continue to pay lenders on time.  To do this, it doesn’t require a credit help service. Don’t spend extra money hiring a <A HREF=http://credit-help-online.com/blog/ TARGET=”_blank”>credit repair agency</A> when all you need to do is to find ways to bring your debt current.

Actual efforts to achieve credit restoration may not be complicated, but it requires patience to see it through.  Stick to the small efforts and quickly you will see your credit improve.

The Truth about Common Credit Myths


If you are interested in learning how to repair your credit, then you will want to read on.  We will be discussing two of the most common myths that people have about credit.

Myth:  My credit score will go up if I pay off delinquent accounts.

Paying a recently delinquent account off can help your score, but if you pay off an older account, you may find that your score goes down.  This obviously isn’t what you want when you are working on credit score repair!  The reason that your score goes down is that paying a collection on will renew the date of last activity. Accounts with recent activity impact your credit greater than accounts with an older date of last activity. This means that a paid collection with the date of last activity of last month will lower your credit score more than an unpaid collection with the date of last activity five years ago. To make matters worse, paying the collection means that the account will stay on your credit file for seven more years.

For this reason, if you’re going to pay off old collections you need to call the creditor and request a pay for delete. What you want is a letter from the creditor saying that they will remove all negative history on the account in exchange for you paying the account in full. Be careful here!  Many creditors will try to word letter to say that they will report the account as paid. This is that what you’re looking for. What you want is a letter that specifically says that the account will either be completely remove your credit file or the all negative history of the account will be removed. Never make a payment prior to getting everything in writing.

Myth:  Accurate information is impossible to remove from my credit file.

While no credit repair company can guarantee that they can help you remove accurate information from your credit report, this doesn’t mean that you can’t get accurate information removed. When you dispute information on your credit report, the creditors have 30 days to respond. If they fail to respond in this time frame, the account must be removed from your credit file. This happens regardless of yet accuracy of the information. By following the same process you would when fixing credit report errors, you may get accurate information remove.

Now, this doesn’t mean that this is a tactic that should be the sole focus of your credit repair process, but it in certain situations it can help you boost your score.