What Does A Credit Repair Company Do?
By disputing and correcting erroneous data on their credit files, a credit repair firm provides services tailored to helping individuals improve their credit scores. Approval for loans, credit cards, rents, and sometimes even a job or insurance depends much on a strong credit score. Hiring a credit repair business may help you with bad issues that have not been correctly recorded or the consequence of a mistake. More significantly, however, how do these businesses try to change consumers' credit records and scores?
Reviewing Credit Reports
Getting the credit reports of the client from the three main credit bureaus—Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion—will be the first action a credit repair firm does. They will review your complete reports looking for all the negative entries that might be challenged: late payments, charge-offs, collections accounts, bankruptcies, repossessions, liens, judgments, and foreclosures. Finding the disparities, outdated information, and errors the reporters made is the goal.
Disputing Negative Items
A credit repair business will start the process of contesting those issues with the bureaus after your reports have been examined and all the negative entries that may be challenged are found. This means crafting dispute letters more in line with the credit report's concerns of relevance. Usually, these messages explain why the objects in issue should not show on your reports or why they should be changed. Should a debt lie outside the reporting period, be inaccurately recorded as a delinquent, or originate from identity theft, the business will strive to remove or change that item.
Providing Validation to Bureaus
During the disputing of negative items, the credit bureaus are required by the Fair Credit Reporting Act to conduct reasonable investigations. In their response to the dispute letters from a credit repair agency, the credit bureaus will request the reporting company or the lender to provide the validation of the item in question. If the source cannot properly support the documentation or evidence of the actual reporting, then the bureau has to delete that negative information from your report. This validation process is what credit repair companies mainly engage in.
Offering Recommendations
Respectable credit repair firms do not merely alter your credit reports. They will also recommend what to do after the reports have been cleaned up. An expert credit repair company may advise on which new credit accounts one should apply for which are perfect for the improved credit score and they may also give advice on how to manage current and future credits to maintain the best scores. Some companies also provide knowledge not only on credit repair strategies but also on other methods that can make your overall financial position better such as budgeting, saving, paying back debts, or investing.
Sending Status Updates
Since the credit bureaus are conducting the investigation of any negative items through the dispute process, a credit repair company will keep you updated on the progress of each dispute all the time. Whenever the responses are received from the bureaus showing that an item has been verified to stay or to be deleted, the repair firm will notify you either through a phone call, email, or through the client portal. The monitoring of the status through the repair process enables one to ascertain the extent of progress during the services.
Multiple Rounds of Disputes
It is usually not easy to get rid of some negative credit report items and it may require several attempts. If the credit bureaus have not removed or modified the entries that have been disputed within the first letters of disagreement, the credit repair company will continue to dispute the same entries through the subsequent additional letters. Multiple rounds can be sent to provide more chances of investigations to produce removal.
Providing Toll-Free Customer Support
Another important aspect of helpful credit repair services is customer service. The best credit repair companies have toll-free call centers so that you can talk to experienced agents with any questions or issues during business days or sometimes around the clock. If anyone has questions about the ongoing dispute process needs a recommendation, or wants an update on anything credit-related, their support is always available.
All that in essence captures a lot of services that credit repair companies extend to their clients in a bid to improve their credit reports and scores. The costs and effectiveness may differ depending on the company but the best firms adhere to the compliance laws and ethical business practices to provide quality credit improvement services where necessary. This can be so because with late payments, collections, bankruptcies, and other major derogatory accounts bringing down significantly your credit scores, professional repair services may well help to restore your credit over time through report reviews and/or dispute programs.
Ready to boost your credit score? Call +1 888-804-0104 now for the best credit repair services near you! Our expert team is here to help you achieve financial freedom and improve your credit. Don't wait—get started today!