Credit Repair: Cleaning up your credit report after a bankruptcy!
It blows my mind how often I have talked to clients who have had a bankruptcy and say that their lawyer told them everything included in the bankruptcy would be cleaned off their credit report. Rarely is this true! The best way to get all this cleaned up is through credit repair. You can go to a credit repair service or creditrepair lawyer who will charge you hundreds, maybe even thousands to get all this cleared up, or you can do it by yourself. Chances are, with the economy as it is at present, you don’t want to spend hundreds and I can understand that! I wouldn’t want to either. And here’s the great news: you don’t need to!
Browse the web and locate some letter templates for credit report disputing. These are very simple 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 decent template and it would be a fine one to utilize. That website also offers sound advice that can easily be followed. There are many websites that offer letter templates so they are easy to find. Or better yet, save yourself even more time and capital and do it all through creditblossom.com.
I look at it like this. Credit repair services and attorneys are going to charge at a minimum $250. I have never found one for under that and most are charging $600 to $1200. You can do credit repair on your own for the price of the envelopes, paper, stamps and your time. The time is usually thetoughest thing to come by. If you are prudent and not wastefull, before you go out and throw down $20,000 on a new automobile, you might invest $500 to get the one you own running correctly. It is the same with credit repair. Even that .gov website 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 quick. Typically, it is going to take 45 – 60 days for all the answers to your letters to circulate through the system. If you spend 45 days doing it on your own, another forty-five will not be all that different if you then opt to go with a credit repair company. You will probably have enough success doing the repair by yourself, 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. A lot of credit repair companies will charge per item that you need to dispute. If there were a few things that you could not get taken care of on your own, then you might work with a credit repair company on only those items. Of course, you can also dispute the items a second time on your own. If you do that, make sure to include proof of your claim.
It is almost unheard of, but out of the thousands of credit reports I have reviewed, I have once in a while seen a customer with a bankruptcy whose credit was reporting correctly after their bankruptcy. I would say 90 – 95% of the time, people will still have balances reporting on items that they rolled into a bankruptcy. Of course, this hurts the overall credit score because it looks as if these items are delinquent after the bankruptcy. Delinquencies after a bankruptcy are very much to be avoided and they are viewed negatively by lending underwriters. When you mail out the letters disputing these accounts, 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 reference this information. If you are not able to do that, you will probably still see good results, but you might have better results if you include the extra information.
Filed Under: News From Our Friends
