The Myth of Easy Credit Report Repair

The Myth of Easy Credit Report Repair

by: Dylan Mills

Do a search for credit report repair or navigate through the forums that are popular with consumer advocates and credit repair specialists and you will likely find more than a few contributors who claim that fixing your credit reports is a simple process. All that is required, according to them, is that you get a copy of your credit reports, compose a dispute letter to the credit bureaus pleading your case, and 30 days later the offending items on your reports are gone. Your credit score is instantly better and you can make all of the purchases your heart desires.

Even more, they make it sound like credit report repair is so easy that any person or company who offers to help you repair your own credit must by trying to bilk you out of your hard earned money. After all, why would you pay someone to fix your credit when it is so easy to do it yourself? You might as well start paying people to tie your shoes in the morning and brush your teeth as well.

The truth is that credit report repair is not as easy as many people claim. If it were, would it really be necessary for Amazon to list hundreds of books about credit report repair? If credit repair were so easy, why would the federal government create legislation to preserve the integrity of the companies offering credit report repair services instead of just banning the practice altogether?

*** Why the Credit Bureaus Make Credit Repair Difficult ***

Understanding why credit repair is not easy and why the process has to be regulated takes a little understanding of the economics driving the credit bureaus; the main three of which are Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. To start with and contrary to what many people believe, credit bureaus are not government entities. They are for profit corporations that make money by collecting your personal information and selling it to interested parties. They are regulated by laws created to oversee credit bureaus but they are not created as a result of legislation.

Being for profit means that the credit bureaus, like any other business, want to focus on the activities that make them money and streamline or do away with activities that do not generate revenue. This applies to credit report repair because the credit bureaus do not make any money off of repairing your credit reports. In truth, if it weren’t for the fact that they are required by law to investigate consumer disputes, the credit bureaus wouldn’t even bother with the practice in the first place. For the credit bureaus, credit report repair is a drain on resources with zero return on investment.

So as a consequence of their economics, the credit bureaus do not want to make it easy for you to repair your credit but even more than that, no one other than yourself wants you to remove errors from your credit report. You are not the primary client of the credit bureaus and until the credit bureaus began selling credit reports directly to consumers (a service that is only necessary because of credit report errors), the credit bureaus could not profit from you at all. It is the creditors that the credit bureaus traditionally profit from and these creditors also do not want you to repair your credit reports. And why is that? It’s because people with errors on their credit reports have lower credit scores; low credit scores that are not an accurate representation of who they are as a lender. This means that creditors can demand a higher interest rate and make more money from you even though you do not pose a credit risk equal to the risk that your bad credit score implies.

*** How the Credit Bureaus Make Credit Repair Difficult ***

Now that we know why the credit bureaus make credit repair difficult the question is how? The answer is by using the same laws that have been enacted to allow consumers to dispute negative items in their credit reports. Credit report legislation states that consumers are able to dispute any items on their credit reports that they feel are “inaccurate, unverifiable, or misleading”. These vaguely defined terms make it possible to dispute a lot of items on credit reports, even ones that the consumer knows to be accurate.

To counter the vague parameters provided to the individual consumers, the credit bureaus were also provided with even more abstract rules. According to the legislation, the credit bureaus are required to investigate consumer disputes unless they feel the disputes are “frivolous or irrelevant” and they take full advantage of this leeway. The credit bureaus set up “gatekeepers” who accept all consumer disputes and decide which disputes warrant an investigation, and since these gatekeepers work for the credit bureaus, they are clearly biased towards the credit bureaus and against you. Getting past the gatekeepers becomes the largest hurdle in credit report repair and frequently devolves into a trial and error process of writing letters, waiting, fielding rejections or stall letters, and starting all over again.

*** Easy Credit Report Repair ***

Credit report repair can still be an easy process from your perspective; it just requires a simpler allocation of resources. Instead of spending resources in the form of time and effort, you can spend a little money to have an expert repair your credit for you. What’s more, just like when you pay professional installers to replace your carpeting instead of performing the process yourself, you will end up with a better finished product in less time.

Professional credit report repair is easy. It is simply a matter of getting your credit reports, providing them to a credit repair agency, selecting which items on your report you want to dispute, and letting them manage the process from there.

There are a number of quality credit report repair companies available with the leading in the credit repair industry being Lexington Law. Lexington operates as a fully licensed law firm and has been honing the craft of credit report repair (getting past the gatekeepers) for over 15 years. For more information about Lexington Law, visit their site directly by browsing to www.lexingtonlaw.com.

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