Does any one know if their’s a forum like this one but on credit and how to wrok and fix credit ?
http://www.debt-consolidation-credit-repair-service.com/forums/index.php
If you have any specific questions please feel free to ask. I consider myself an expert on the topic as I have removed judgments, bankruptcys, liens, and other false information.
Hooch,
I have some questions.
Back when I was naive I was shopping around for financing on a car/house and I got dinged with multiple hard inquirys and I have a long list of them on my credit report.
Till this day I still have some of the banks dinging me and showing up on my report. How do I get rid of the inquiry’s? Call the CB and tell them its false?
thx
If you deny the inquiries having a legitimate reason to check your credit Equifax will delete them, TransUnion will tell you that they won’t delete them and they will tell you that you should contact the company who put it there and Experian will keep them with no discussion. Experian is the nastiest of the bunch.
I wouldn’t worry too much about any inquiry that is older than a year and you get around 6 a year without harming your FICO.
If you’re looking to fix your credit, there are a couple things you can do for a quick fix - though minor improvments;
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Check your deb-ratio: make sure your outstanding balance isn’t over 30% of your available balance. If one of your credit cards is maxed out, move some of those funds to a card that doesn’t have a balance.
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Pay on time: by far the best thing you can do… recent events affect your score more than older events, so start paying your bills.
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Dispute: By law you can dispute anything on your file, but more importantly - check your credit report to make sure there are no mistakes on it. Its’ quite common for the wrong information to be listed, and that can hurt your score (closed accounts being listed as open, late payments on credit cards you never owned, etc). The credit reporting companies have to remove inaccurate information, but you have to find them and then notify the agencies first.
Good luck!
I would definitely suggest that your outstanding balance on your credit cards is 10% or less. The lower it goes the higher your score goes. Drop it to zero and you will get a nice boost. Drop it minus zero (pay a few bucks more than owed) and you will be punished. It’s amazing but your score will actually temporarily drop if you accidentally pay more than owed.
To further expand on what Ryan said relating to disputes, just remember that it is not illegal to be stupid. If you forgot that you already had an item verified it’s OK. By law they have to re-verify it. When the original creditor sees that they are having to continually re prove the debt than quite often they don’t bother to respond. If they don’t respond it is wiped from your credit. You see, just because they verified it doesn’t mean that it is legally on there. There could be other reasons like you thought that debt was older than the date that was listed which would be beyond the point in time where they have to take it off, or maybe that they have it listed as a “joint” debt between you and your X and you know that it was hers and not yours, etc.
Houch…do you work in BANKING or FINANCE with credit??? Bad advice…honestly… I come from the field…
Balances just need to be under 25% and your fine. Paying off the debt in full is worse, shows you can not make monthly payments, but yes 10% is fine but will not improve the score.
Get on the do not solicit credit list. This is where companies can not mail you out credit card offers. It will raise your score from 5-15 points based on demographics.
As for disputing. Yes, you can be stupid and keep doing it. However after awhile the credit agencies will no longer handle the dispute, but rather see it as a waste of time. They will contact you via mail and ask you to put a comment on the tradeline. You can not go and dispute the same item 10 times a year in hopes it comes off. They will notice it, and flag it on their end. Info in hand, when it comes they know. It becomes tiresome for them.
Also remember banks are getting smarter, They will ask you to fill out a fraud statement. Well do that and your purging yourself and can goto jail since your about to lie on a document that will be turned over to the police claiming you did not make those purchase. So be careful.
Contact the creditor directly several times asking for proof is easiest at times. Some are nice some are not. My firm never removes anything and we log back for 10 years. Most banks keep only 5 years on the computer. The file room which no one goes to has all the hard copies past 5 years. It is easy to get a 5+ yr file removed. However, if it is late payments, they only need to send the CB a pay history. NO other proof needed. That is the push of a button.
“”“Paying off the debt in full is worse, shows you can not make monthly payments, but yes 10% is fine but will not improve the score.”“”
Wrong, I get my FICO score every month and am 100% positive that you will have a 20 point boost if you pay your debt off in full each month. This is common knowledge for those who are experienced with credit repair.
“”“Get on the do not solicit credit list. This is where companies can not mail you out credit card offers. It will raise your score from 5-15 points based on demographics.”“”
This I didn’t know but I’m not too sure if I believe it because of all of the other inaccurate information.
“”“They will contact you via mail and ask you to put a comment on the tradeline.”“”
They ask you that every time after it has been verified once. And your point is what? You do not put a comment or you are admitting that it is your debt and why would someone admit something was theirs that wasn’t?
“”“You can not go and dispute the same item 10 times a year in hopes it comes off. They will notice it, and flag it on their end.”“”
Wrong again. This supposed firm that you work for must really have a tough time cleaning up anything off someones credit. They will notice that you keep asking and put a fraud alert on your account. You then send the letter to CRA to remove the fraud alert.
“”“It becomes tiresome for them. “””
Tiresome does not matter, it is their job and they are required to do it by law.
“”“Also remember banks are getting smarter, They will ask you to fill out a fraud statement. “””
We are talking about the CRA, not banks. Are you in the same conversation that we are?
“”“Contact the creditor directly several times asking for proof is easiest at times.”“”
You are clearly showing that you don’t know what you are talking about here.
Mime19, just go to the credit repair boards that were listed and you will see that yrush has no idea what he is talking about or is working for one of those places that charges you out the gazoo and gets nothing off. This is easy to do with persistence yourself. The FTC strongly warns people about using Credit Repair Companies. Many scammers out there.
Another red flag is you will also see on the boards that his lingo is incorrect. He says “they only need to send the CB a pay history” and he normally would have said CRA. No one in the industry calls the Credit Reporting Agency a Credit Bureau. That is a name for them but it is commonly called a CRA within the credit repair industry. Go to the boards and see for yourself.
Yeah, I gotta support Hooch on this one, nearly everything he’s said is correct and can be verified by other’s experiences through creditboard.com (a site I frequent often).
yrush, just out of curiousity, what kind of firm do your work for? It would be nice to get an insiders point of view, if in fact you do work for a CRA?
So sense I started the post I have been working on the credit report and have had success with Experian , I still have to do some work but everything so far is going well the credit web site has a lot of good information this one is easier to navigate but is still good information.
Experian, huh? They are the nastiest of the bunch. Tell me how you have had success so quickly. Hopefully it is not because you are calling them. If you saw somewhere that you should call them I would strongly suggest that you abandon that advise.
well it was at fist by letter I had to change, my wife name it had so miss info and a account that I disputed, after getting back a couple of letter with the same mistake I had my wife call she wait on hold for about 5 minutes and explain the situation they look at the record they fix the name and the account that we where disputing did not appeared in the file. She got a for a file # that recorded the call and the changes made. And that was that . And this was my first time every fixing anything from my file or hers so one down and 2 to go :beer
Mime19,
The biggest and best forum for credit is the CreditBoards.com. You could spend hours reading about credit repair there. Lots of good people who are happy to help. Of course, not all advice is correct because anyone can post. But you learn what makes sense and what does not.
Good Luck
Paula S
BuisnessLoanCafe