Easy Steps to Repair Your Credit
Repairing your credit history is something you CAN do! Your credit history and associated credit score are one of the most important tools you have to building personal wealth. Ensuring that your credit is as good as possible is an important undertaking. Cleaning up bad credit and outstanding credit issues is a critical step to controlling your financial freedom. This is something you can do and something that you can do without professional help. However, there are several myths and traps that people fall into when starting down this path. Let’s take a look at some of the most common misstatements you’ll come across and examine them in detail.
MYTH #1 “Credit repair doesn’t work!”
While it’s true that credit repair is more “art” than “science” that’s not to say it doesn’t work. If you undertake to repair your bad credit score, there’s never any guarantee you can restore it to “perfect” status. But sometimes you can, and in almost every case you can at least affect some improvement in your credit score, and often major improvement at that! Credit reports for the most part are filled with errors. While there seems to be no general agreement, it’s estimated that anywhere from 1/3 (Attorney General of NY) to as many as 90% (Charles Givens Organization) of credit reports contain errors.
Removal of erroneous negative information alone will go a great way toward improving your credit score. But there’s more to the story, which brings us to myth #2.
MYTH #2 “Negative information that can be verified cannot be removed”
This is one of those statements that are “almost” true, but taken literally is misleading. As is often the case, the inclusion (or exclusion) of one seemingly small word makes the difference in a truthful statement, and one that’s not (or not necessarily) accurate.
Let’s take an analogy. Suppose it’s the middle of summer, and your grass has grown unusually high. Let’s also suppose that you own a lawn mower, it’s in good working condition, and has plenty of gasoline in the tank. Now let’s say that you’re sitting on your couch and say to yourself “My grass will get cut today because I ‘CAN’ go outdoors anytime and cut it.” So will your grass get cut? Not necessarily! Just because you “can” go outdoors and cut your grass doesn’t mean it’s going to get done. You can repeat this statement to yourself all day long, but your grass isn’t going to get cut until you actually go outside and DO it!
