Credit Repair Letter - What It Does For You

Posted by John Cooper

October 23, 2008

by John Cooper

A credit repair letter is how you challenge negative items on your credit report. This letter is also commonly called a dispute letter.

By sending this letter you are telling the credit bureau that the listing is incorrect and should be removed. Upon receipt of this letter the bureaus will conduct an investigation into the listing. Be aware that a separate letter must be sent to each credit bureau.

In your letter you must give the specifics about the listing. This includes why the listing is incorrect and should be deleted. Reasons often include; account is paid in full, item is out of date, reporting the wrong account balance and more.

Congress passed the Fair Credit Reporting Act to help protect you from the credit bureaus. This law forces the bureaus to investigate a dispute and remove any inaccurate or unverifiable listing from your credit report. Consumers had no method of removing a negative item from their credit before this law.

The brick wall that many people face is to get the credit bureau to deem your letter a “valid” dispute. This is because it will only cost the bureaus potential profits to conduct investigations.

Thus credit bureaus use stall tactics and avoid investigations when possible. Often a response to a dispute letter is to request more information, regardless of the need for it. This is an attempt to frustrate you into giving up on the dispute process.

You should also be aware that the 100 word statement serves no benefit to you. This is a statement that you can place on your credit report next to a negative mark.

In the past this was used to explain what happened. However today if you fill in this statement you are only admitting guilt to the bureaus.

If you do this it will be next to impossible to ever remove this mark from your credit report. The credit bureaus will deem any future dispute letter challenging that mark as frivolous.

Negative listings can be removed; you just need to be persistent and patient. I would suggest looking into a credit repair service if you have multiple negative listings on your credit report.

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