It amazes me how many times I have talked to clients who have had a bankruptcy and say that their lawyer told them that all the accounts included in the bankruptcy would be cleared off their credit report. Rarely is this true! The smartest way to get all this cleared up is through credit repair. You can go to a credit repair service or creditrepair lawyer who will bill you hundredsif not thousands to get all this cleaned up, or you can do it on your own. Chances are, with the economy the way it is right now, you don’t want to spend hundreds and I can understand that! I wouldn’t want to either. And the good news is you don’t need to!
Search the web and locate some letter templates for credit report disputing. These are really easy to find. The first link that comes up under the keyword search “credit repair” is a .gov site that has a free template. It is a pretty good template and it would be a good one to utilize. That site also gives sound advice that can easily be followed. There are a lot of websites that offer letter templates so they are easy to locate. Or even better, save yourself even more time and money and do it all through creditblossom.com.
I look at it this way. Credit repair services and attorneys are going to charge at a minimum 250 dollars. I have never seen one for less than that and most cost $600 to $1200. You can do credit repair on your own for the price of the stamps, envelopes, paper, and your time. The time is usually thetoughest thing to come by. If you are smart and conservative, before you go out and unload $20,000 on a new vehicle, you might spend $500 to get the one you own running correctly. It is just like that with credit repair. Even that government site from the Google search advises that self-help may be the best way to go. Something to bear in mind is that credit repair is not fast. Typically, it is going to take 45 – 60 days for all the answers to your letters to get back to you. If you wait 45 days doing it on your own, another forty-five will not be that much different if you then decided to use a credit repair company. You will likely have enough success doing the repair on your own, but if you do end up deciding to spend the cash and work with a credit repair company, you will still have saved yourself a lot of money. Many credit repair companies will charge per account that you want to dispute. If there were a couple things that you could not get fixed on your own, then you might work with a credit repair company on just those accounts. Naturally, you can also dispute the accounts a second time on your own. When you do that, be sure to include documentation that proves your claim.
It is rare, but out of the thousands of credit reports I have seen, I have occasionally seen a customer with a bankruptcy whose credit was reporting accurately after their bankruptcy. I would say 90 – 95% of the time, folks will still have debts showing up on items that they included in a bankruptcy. Of course, this hurts the overall credit score because it looks like these accounts are delinquent after the bankruptcy. Delinquencies after a bankruptcy are highly to be avoided and they are looked at harshly by lending underwriters. When you mail out the letters disputing these items, you should add a sentence or two that states that you included the account in a bankruptcy. You should include the case number of your bankruptcy and the address of the bankruptcy court so the credit bureau and the lender can see this information. If you are not able to do that, you will most likely still get good results, but you might have better results if you include the extra information.
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