The Credit Challenge

In the last post, I mentioned how crucial it was to learn how to do credit repair yourself. I shared the first 3 of 5 quick and easy steps to do credit repair yourself.

Without further ado, here are the last two tips.

1. Raise your credit limits – you may be asking yourself, “How can raising your credit limits help when you are doing credit repair yourself?” The magic about this is that 30 percent of your credit score is directly impacted by the balance on your account compared to the limit on that account. So there is only two ways to change this aspect of your credit score. Either you pay down the balance or you raise up the credit limit. Either can give you an equal result when doing credit repair yourself.

2.  Continue monitoring your credit score – here’s where most people miss it big time. They take the initial actions to repair their credit themselves, but then they never follow up to be certain that those actions really helped their credit scores. That’s the pitfall of doing credit repair yourself; you may not have a good system for following through until you get the results in your credit that you are looking for. The best tool to use here is a calendar and simply putting reminders every one to two months to check your credit report and credit scores again.

So now you have it, the 5 quick and easy steps to do credit repair yourself.  Like I told you before, it’s quite easy if you know how to do it.  These 5 steps will definitely get you started on the right foot.

Don’t forget to leave your comments and let me know if this was helpful.

In this tough economy, when every dollar counts, it is crucial to learn how to do credit repair yourself. Each and every day, thousands of desperate people are needlessly running to credit repair agencies spending hundreds, even thousands of dollars trying to get their credit up to par.

But it really isn’t that difficult at all to repair credit yourself if you know the basic things that most credit repair services would otherwise do for you for a fee.

If you aren’t aware of those simple actions, here are the first 3 of 5 quick and easy steps to do credit repair yourself.

1. Access a copy of your credit report – you are entitled to a copy of your credit report for free once a year. You can access it in the mail, by phone, or even online. Although you get this free credit report, be sure to also get your credit scores along with your report, as this is the foundation for doing credit repair for yourself.
2. Check your credit report for errors – this is one of the biggest factors that credit repair agencies bank on – the mistakes that can you easy remove yourself while you’re in the process of credit repair. Look for wrong addresses, wrong social security numbers, accounts with balances that you’ve already paid off, and even accounts with late payments that were actually made on time.
3. Negotiate account payoffs – here’s another area that you are typically charged for by credit repair agencies which you can avoid by doing the credit repair yourself. All you have to do is call your creditors on collection or past due accounts and ask them to settle with you. Just let them know that you will pay off the balance, but that you are only able to pay a certain amount. If the creditor agrees, you have just saved a few hundred dollars and you now have a zero balance on that account.

The best thing to do is to start today with these first 3 steps to doing credit repair yourself. Once you complete these, which shouldn’t take long at all, then you’ll

I’ve talked to many people over time who have been told about sending letters to their creditors to clear off items from their credit. This is definitely a great approach to take when working to improve your credit score.

Although sending out letters is a very effective method of boosting your credit score, there is one major thing that most people forget.

What is that you may ask?

Simple, it is to continue following up after the initial credit letter is sent out. You see, just because you send one letter doesn’t automatically mean that it will all work out.

A more powerful approach is actually to have a credit reporting service that will give you access to your credit score each month. That way, you can monitor if the letters worked or not.

If your letter worked, you would see those negative items removed from your credit. If not, you would know that sending another letter the following month would be your next step.

The point is, the magic is in the follow up. Be sure to check to see if you’ve gotten results. Only then will you truly know what else is left.

This approach is what major credit repair agencies take to clear your credit. They just use a system to continually monitor the results of the letters they send on your behalf, and then send them over and over again until they can clear those items off of your credit report.

So knowing this, you can take the same approach that credit repair agencies take, but save yourself the money that they would normally charge.