Credit Report Letters Examples

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Congrats!!!!

Let's get started! First if you have not pulled your free credit reports from  www.annualcreditreport.com or you can go directly to the credit bureaus. They provide the most detailed information.  You must  ensure each tradeline is reporting accurately.

When reviewing your reports, you’ll notice that each credit bureau’s report has 6 main parts:

• Your personal information, including your name, social security number, current and past mailing addresses, telephone numbers, etc.
• A summary of the types of accounts that are reflected on your credit reports
• A list of contact information for the creditors reporting on your credit.
• A list of your public records, if any
• A list of inquiries from companies you have given permission to pull your credit reports

Most will bypass all of the other areas on their credit reports and will go directly to the sections where their negative accounts are located. 

STOP!!!  I want to encourage you to make your first step your personal information!

Although, our personal information has no impact on our credit scores, it is very important for 3 specific reasons:

1. You’ll be able to see right away if your information has been merged or compromised. If there is more than one social security number or date of birth, obviously something is amiss. If there’s an address listed that you’ve never lived at before or a name that clearly isn’t yours, this can instantly be a red flag. Note: Credit bureaus will never seek out any information that is reflected on your credit reports. All of your personal information is reported to them from companies that you have done business with or have completed an application for credit with. So, if it’s reported on your credit report, there’s an account or inquiry tied to it as well.
2. If you’ll be searching for a home or car or some other major purchase where they’ll need to review your credit history, multiple addresses and names can cause your report to either not produce a credit record at all or to pull up partial information. This causes your application to be flagged for manual underwriting for potential fraud.
3. Think of how the credit bureaus conduct their investigations on disputed items. They will first match your dispute against what is already in their database before approaching the company furnishing the information on your credit report. What are they checking the accounts against? Your personal information! By removing those older addresses and names that are no longer relevant, you increase your chances of a more thorough investigation being conducted from the very beginning.

Once you have your personal information dispute sent out, you can focus on your account information—particularly your negative accounts. You want to focus on accounts that are inaccurate, incomplete, can’t be verified, and are past the 7-year federal reporting limitation. Thoroughly look over each item to ensure it is 100% accurate.

You may have to pull your personal records to compare against what is showing on your credit report. In other cases, you can look at the account and see data that conflicts with each other or that is missing key information that makes your account look worse than it really is. One example of this is late payments reporting on a closed account, or a closed account still reporting as open.

Your primary goal is to have your most current information showing. I’ve included a Personal Data Form for you to log your older addresses, names, and other personal information that you’ll be disputing for removal. You can either dispute online or via the U.S. Postal Service. I’ve also attached a sample dispute letter for you to personalize if you decide to do the latter.

I’ve attached a list of the most common errors to look out for when reviewing your account information and a Negative Listings worksheet to record them on.

For credit improvement purposes, items reported up to 24 months earlier will have the greatest impact on your scores. So, pay special attention to newer negative items as their removal will have the most positive impact on your credit scores.

Next, look over your list of items again and see which ones are past your state’s statute of limitations. If an item has passed your statute of limitations, I’ve found they are a bit easier to get off. Keep in mind that accounts that have almost passed your statute of limitations can trigger more aggressive collection activities as there is very little time to enforce payment of the debt.

ARE YOU READY TO GET STARTED?

LET'S GET IT!

P.S. These are the steps I took to getting my credit back in order! I do not restore credit nor do I claim to be licensed.