1. How Can bad credit legally be repaired?
It is your right and responsibility to assure the accuracy of the items on your credit reports. If information recorded on your credit reports does not accurately represent your behavior as a consumer, then you have the right to request that questionable information be removed from your reports. The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), Fair Credit Billing Act (FCBA) and the Fair Debt Collections Practices Act (FDCPA) afford you the legal right to dispute inaccurate items on your credit reports with the credit bureaus and your individual creditors.
The most popular method for restoring bad credit is the credit bureau dispute. Because of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, you have the right to dispute and delete any items on your credit report that you feel are inaccurate, untimely, misleading, biased, incomplete or unverified.
When you dispute a questionable negative credit item with the credit bureaus, you are demanding that they perform an investigation to determine whether or not the item should be listed on your credit reports. If the credit bureau cannot verify the accuracy of the item, then they are required to correct the listing or completely delete it from your credit report.
Another facet of credit repair is to work with your creditors to remove the negative items from your credit reports. Your creditors have the ability to delete negative items from your credit reports at any time. With more cooperative creditors, sometimes all it takes is to ask the creditor to adjust or delete a negative credit listing. In situations where this non-confrontational approach is not sufficient, the various consumer protection acts provide you with tools for forcing creditors and collections agencies to prove the accuracy of the reported accounts.
By using some or all of their legal rights to fair and accurate credit reporting, thousands of people have legally and successfully restored their credit and improved their credit score.
Consumer protection laws are in place to keep you from becoming a victim of the credit reporting system.
By taking advantage of your rights under these statutes, you can help ensure that you are not charged excessive interest rates or unfairly denied credit.
Sometimes it becomes necessary to attack your credit reports with a variety of legal tactics.
When a credit bureau investigation fails to remove a negative item, the FCBA and FDCPA provide additional avenues for improving your credit score.
The most popular method for restoring bad credit is the credit bureau dispute. Because of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, you have the right to dispute and delete any items on your credit report that you feel are inaccurate, untimely, misleading, biased, incomplete or unverified.
When you dispute a questionable negative credit item with the credit bureaus, you are demanding that they perform an investigation to determine whether or not the item should be listed on your credit reports. If the credit bureau cannot verify the accuracy of the item, then they are required to correct the listing or completely delete it from your credit report.
Another facet of credit repair is to work with your creditors to remove the negative items from your credit reports. Your creditors have the ability to delete negative items from your credit reports at any time. With more cooperative creditors, sometimes all it takes is to ask the creditor to adjust or delete a negative credit listing. In situations where this non-confrontational approach is not sufficient, the various consumer protection acts provide you with tools for forcing creditors and collections agencies to prove the accuracy of the reported accounts.
By using some or all of their legal rights to fair and accurate credit reporting, thousands of people have legally and successfully restored their credit and improved their credit score.
Consumer protection laws are in place to keep you from becoming a victim of the credit reporting system.
By taking advantage of your rights under these statutes, you can help ensure that you are not charged excessive interest rates or unfairly denied credit.
Sometimes it becomes necessary to attack your credit reports with a variety of legal tactics.
When a credit bureau investigation fails to remove a negative item, the FCBA and FDCPA provide additional avenues for improving your credit score.
2. How Do you help repair bad credit?
How we dispute items on your credit report:
CreditZap helps clients investigate, repair and dispute, as applicable, their bad credit by working to ensure that the negative items appearing within their credit reports are fairly reported, 100% accurate, and fully substantiated.
The firm offers three service levels, each building upon the last:
With our Standard Service, we will target your unfair credit report items by directing tough questions and legal interventions to creditors and credit bureaus, as appropriate, pursuant to several consumer protection statutes like the Fair Credit Reporting Act, Fair Credit Billing Act, and others. Next, CreditZap's Premier service level builds on Standard but also allows you to take advantage of services designed to monitor your credit reports, understand your credit score, and address problematic credit report inquiries. Finally, our PremierPlus service adds legal interventions for abusive debt collectors, pursuant to the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, real-time fraud monitoring, and tools to manage your personal finances.
With each service level, you will use the online Portal Provided to manage the process. Once we've received your credit reports, we will analyze them and add the applicable negative items they contain to your personalized Portal. You will then be able to provide us additional detail regarding how each item has unfairly impacted your credit.
Once you have provided more information within your portal regarding items you want us to challenge and dispute, as appropriate, CreditZap will prepare the appropriate intervention letters for creditors and challenge letters for bureaus.
Legal interventions sent to creditors, such as escalated account investigations, goodwill interventions and formal requests for debt validation, may increase the likelihood of accelerated results but do not necessarily follow the same timeline as for credit bureau challenges. Also, when a creditor agrees to stop reporting a negative item, it typically disappears from all three credit reports at once.
At the conclusion of the credit bureau's investigation, a new copy of your credit report should be sent to your home along with any deletions or improvements if any were made. Be sure to forward to us any information you may receive directly from creditors and bureaus. In turn, we'll keep you posted regarding our communications within the Creditzap Portal site.
In order for credit bureaus to maintain a questionable credit listing within your report, they must have evidence that it is fair, veritably accurate, and wholly substantiated. If the credit listing is only somewhat inaccurate, the credit bureau may simply change the item to reflect the accurate status. Very often, though, disputed credit items cannot be verified because a creditor or third-party debt collector no longer possesses the information or does not wish to go to the trouble of verifying it. In these cases, the listing should be removed. Also, credit bureau re-investigations must be completed within a reasonable period, usually 30 days, or the listing must be removed.
For these reasons, properly challenged questionable credit listings have been removed with remarkable frequency.* Remember that you have the right under federal law to conduct your own credit repair work if you so choose.
CreditZap helps clients investigate, repair and dispute, as applicable, their bad credit by working to ensure that the negative items appearing within their credit reports are fairly reported, 100% accurate, and fully substantiated.
The firm offers three service levels, each building upon the last:
With our Standard Service, we will target your unfair credit report items by directing tough questions and legal interventions to creditors and credit bureaus, as appropriate, pursuant to several consumer protection statutes like the Fair Credit Reporting Act, Fair Credit Billing Act, and others. Next, CreditZap's Premier service level builds on Standard but also allows you to take advantage of services designed to monitor your credit reports, understand your credit score, and address problematic credit report inquiries. Finally, our PremierPlus service adds legal interventions for abusive debt collectors, pursuant to the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, real-time fraud monitoring, and tools to manage your personal finances.
With each service level, you will use the online Portal Provided to manage the process. Once we've received your credit reports, we will analyze them and add the applicable negative items they contain to your personalized Portal. You will then be able to provide us additional detail regarding how each item has unfairly impacted your credit.
Once you have provided more information within your portal regarding items you want us to challenge and dispute, as appropriate, CreditZap will prepare the appropriate intervention letters for creditors and challenge letters for bureaus.
Legal interventions sent to creditors, such as escalated account investigations, goodwill interventions and formal requests for debt validation, may increase the likelihood of accelerated results but do not necessarily follow the same timeline as for credit bureau challenges. Also, when a creditor agrees to stop reporting a negative item, it typically disappears from all three credit reports at once.
At the conclusion of the credit bureau's investigation, a new copy of your credit report should be sent to your home along with any deletions or improvements if any were made. Be sure to forward to us any information you may receive directly from creditors and bureaus. In turn, we'll keep you posted regarding our communications within the Creditzap Portal site.
In order for credit bureaus to maintain a questionable credit listing within your report, they must have evidence that it is fair, veritably accurate, and wholly substantiated. If the credit listing is only somewhat inaccurate, the credit bureau may simply change the item to reflect the accurate status. Very often, though, disputed credit items cannot be verified because a creditor or third-party debt collector no longer possesses the information or does not wish to go to the trouble of verifying it. In these cases, the listing should be removed. Also, credit bureau re-investigations must be completed within a reasonable period, usually 30 days, or the listing must be removed.
For these reasons, properly challenged questionable credit listings have been removed with remarkable frequency.* Remember that you have the right under federal law to conduct your own credit repair work if you so choose.
3. How Long does credit repair take?
It would be inappropriate for CreditZap or any other law firm to promise a particular case outcome during a definitive time frame. In other words, because so much depends upon third parties like creditors and credit bureaus, and because each client case is unique, we can’t predict whether any specific credit report item will ultimately be corrected.
What we can promise, however, is to complete the promised work each month — sending appropriate creditor interventions and bureau challenges, preparing applicable monthly credit score improvement analyses, and making sure that other service features you have engaged are provided.
We can also provide you with information regarding what kinds of credit report outcomes our past clients have seen. As is true in all legal matters, no two cases are the same and your experience may differ. Statistically, our clients have seen impressive credit report results, with an average of 10.2 items, or 24% of their representing negatives, removed within 4 months.** Again, the progress of your case will depend on your timely participation (keeping us updated when you have additional information), the nature of your case, and the level of third-party (creditors, debt collectors, bureaus) cooperation. No law firm can promise a particular result within a certain time frame since every case and credit report is different.
Be wary of any credit repair company that guarantees to "clean up your credit in 30 days".
Not only is it illegal to guarantee results for credit repair, it is impossible to predict final actions and decisions of creditors, debt collectors, and credit bureaus.
What we can promise, however, is to complete the promised work each month — sending appropriate creditor interventions and bureau challenges, preparing applicable monthly credit score improvement analyses, and making sure that other service features you have engaged are provided.
We can also provide you with information regarding what kinds of credit report outcomes our past clients have seen. As is true in all legal matters, no two cases are the same and your experience may differ. Statistically, our clients have seen impressive credit report results, with an average of 10.2 items, or 24% of their representing negatives, removed within 4 months.** Again, the progress of your case will depend on your timely participation (keeping us updated when you have additional information), the nature of your case, and the level of third-party (creditors, debt collectors, bureaus) cooperation. No law firm can promise a particular result within a certain time frame since every case and credit report is different.
Be wary of any credit repair company that guarantees to "clean up your credit in 30 days".
Not only is it illegal to guarantee results for credit repair, it is impossible to predict final actions and decisions of creditors, debt collectors, and credit bureaus.
4. Can deleted items re-appear on my credit report?
On occasion, a negative listing that was recently deleted may eventually be verified by the creditor. The Fair Credit Reporting Act requires that the credit bureau inform you before they re-report a previously deleted listing. The FCRA also makes it more difficult for credit bureaus to re-report listings. Because of these factors, it is fairly rare for listings to come back on once they've been deleted.
If a questionable credit item is verified at a later point in time, CreditZap will help you challenge the listing again if there are legitimate grounds to do so.
If a questionable credit item is verified at a later point in time, CreditZap will help you challenge the listing again if there are legitimate grounds to do so.
5. Will Credit Repair Improve/Increase My Credit Score?
- Continue to pay your bills on time, to avoid having new issues appear.
- Avoid opening any new lines of credit during the process. We want to increase your score,and allow you to get the best offers with the lowest interest rates.
- Keep track of your progress weekly, to see how things are progressing.
- Send all correspondence from any creditors, bureaus, etc to us ASAP
- Call or email with any and all of your questions
