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1. Review Your Credit Report For Errors.
After you have received a copy of your credit
report, you need to look through it very
closely.
It is important to first review all the
personal identifying information in your credit
report such as name, address, social security
number, birth date, and so on.
You should then evaluate each account that is
reported about you to the credit bureau.
Determine whether any of this information is in
any way inaccurate, incorrect, erroneous,
misleading, or outdated. If you find that any of
the information in incorrect, then you should
move on to the next step.
2. Dispute the errors with the credit
bureaus and your creditors.
You should dispute inaccurate information
with both the consumer credit reporting agency
and the furnisher (creditor). Disputing with
both allows you to cover all of your bases to
ensure that the corrections are consistently
made by both sources.
You should follow up with these companies to
ensure that the inaccurate or incomplete
information is removed in a timely manner. You
should then continue to monitor your credit
information on a regular basis by ordering and
reviewing your consumer credit reports from the
major credit reporting agencies on a regular
basis.
3. Repeat until satisfied.
It is very important that each questionable
item, except for erroneous personal data, is
dealt with individually. If you attempt to have
the credit reporting agency correct several
items at once, it will be easier for the agency
to claim that your request is frivolous or
irrelevant. If they make this determination,
then your requests to correct inaccuracies will
be discarded.
Make sure that you use a clear and concise
statement indicating that the accuracy or
completeness of a specific item is "disputed" or
"challenged". Remember that explanations of why
an item might be derogatory will not help you,
only actual disputes of specific items will get
the results you need.
As soon as the credit reporting agency
provides you with an updated credit report
indicating that the disputed item has been
removed from your report, you should send
another letter challenging the next most
damaging item. Repeat this process, until each
and every disputed item has been deleted from
your credit report.
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