SolveYourProblem.com Article Series: Debt Relief & Debt Consolidation
I Want To Get Rid Of My Debt...NOW!

Top Reasons Not to Trust Credit Repair Companies
   

Have you ever seen the ads for those companies that offer to repair your credit? This might send you dreaming to a time when your credit is no longer considered poor but good, when you can apply for a car loan with a real bank instead of going through the car dealer’s cronies who charge you an exorbitant interest rate, and when you can hold you head high and ask for a credit card with a decent interest rate rather than those cards where you have to put a deposit down and pay a monthly fee before they will even talk to you. Sure, the lure of the quick and easy fix is indeed inviting, yet do these promises hold any water? Is it truly possible to get rid of all those late pays, foreclosure notations, and repossessions on your record?

In short, the answer is no. If you are still dying to sign up with one of the credit repair clinics that are ready and waiting to take your money, here are some reasons not to trust those credit repair places!

Your idea of a cleaned up credit record and theirs may be worlds apart, and you still end up paying for it!

For example, the offer to clean up your credit can mean as little as their talking to the credit reporting agencies on your behalf if you find errors made on your credit report. You do not need to pay somebody good money to do that! You can easily alert the credit reporting agencies to any mistakes on your record and demand that they will be fixed. Errors on credit reports happen every day, and so do consumer phone calls, emails, and letters that clear them up. You can pull your credit report, oftentimes for free, at least once a year and attached to it you will find detailed instructions on how to dispute mistakes. Verifiable items, such as your car’s repossession or collection agency accounts will remain on your record until you clear them up.

You may end up on the wrong side of the law.

A conviction for fraud will affect your life far more than a bad credit rating. There are credit repair companies out there that “harvest” social security numbers and will offer them to you for sale. You are then encouraged to build a new credit profile using that social security number, perhaps a phony address you set up, such as a post office box, and apply for credit with your new record. Of course, not only is this highly illegal, but it also does nothing to fix your bad credit - that is still there.

The credit repair clinic may attempt to “snow” the credit bureaus.

Of course, the credit bureaus are wise to this move. It involves the repair clinic inundating the credit-reporting agency with requests for verification on your behalf. The goal is to overwhelm the agency with your request for verification, hoping that they will just go ahead and delete the negative information without even bother checking it. This will not happen, and may actually cause legitimate claims to be dismissed by the agency as being frivolous. Additionally, if by chance some information will get deleted this way, the fix is only temporary. Creditors report to the agencies on a monthly basis, and so any negative notation that got deleted today will be re-reported next month.

Would you pay $500 for a bit of common sense advice?

Probably not, but the sad reality is that after you but down your hard earned cash and paid the credit repair clinic, their method of cleaning up judgments and liens will be by negotiating with your lien holders and getting them to take your payment in return for a promise to remove the derogatory item off your credit report. You can do this yourself by talking to your creditor directly, and you most certainly do not need to pay a middleman to do it.

So – do you really think you should do business with a company that will promise you things that you can do yourself, without having to pay a bunch of money for it? Should you be risking your freedom in order to participate in some shady deals with social security numbers that are not yours? Of course not! So – do not trust those credit repair places!

Click here if you are drowning in credit card debt, facing foreclosure, being harassed my debt collectors or simply feel like a victim of this economic crisis. It's my SolveYourProblem recommendation.

# # # # #

by SolveYourProblem.com : 2007

> Home > Debt Free Articles: Main Page