Clean Up Credit Report

The heading of this article would have astonished many people in such a way that they wouldn’t think twice before counseling with the International Debt Collectors fund but this writing is not for them to go to that extremity but just to clear a few airs as to what exactly a credit report is all about so that it can be cleaned up on time, which is of vital importance by the way.

To this point you’ve learned how to improve your credit scores by paying down all of your credit cards to under 30% of the maximum balance, and then keep them there by spending very lightly on your credit cards each month. You may also have learned something when we talked about goodwill adjustments and account re-aging, but there may still be a few blemishes on your credit report and there are some tricks to get those taken care of as well. Part four in our series on How to Improve Credit Scores will cover How to Clean Up a Credit Report.

How to Clean Up a Credit Report

The first thing that you can do to clean up your credit report is surprisingly easy. You may not know that you can dispute any debt on your credit report fairly easily.

Dispute Old Items

Remember that argument you got into with the cell phone company a couple of years ago that resulted in you getting mad and tell them to cancel your account and then refusing to pay? That account may have been sitting in collections for quite some time now. And one of the things that you can try is to just go through all of the negative items on your credit report and challenge each negative injury as inaccurate or not. On very old and small balance collections there is a fairly good likelihood that a collection agency will not respond in a timely enough fashion, if at all, to the credit agency request for verification.

Challenge Inaccurate Items

While you’re working to clean up your credit report, you should certainly challenge every inaccuracy in an error blitz attack. Anything negative that is older than seven years should already have fallen off your credit or as well as any accounts that show as unpaid that might have been included in a bankruptcy.

You also need to look to clean up old accounts that are shown as charged off, settled or anything other than paid on time, and challenge every one if you paid in full and on schedule. Included in this list is also credit limits reported as lower than they actually should be.

Lastly, make sure that every single debt on your credit report is actually yours. There are a surprising number of mistakes on most people’s credit reports. Don’t let someone else’s bad deed impact your scores. These are relatively easy to have taken off and removed from your report.

Cleaning up old and inaccurate items from your credit report will drastically help improve your overall scores. By limiting your balances and getting rid of negative reported items on your credit report, you will be more than halfway towards improving your credit scores. In our last article of this series, we’ve got a few more tips that will help you maintain your new, higher scores so stay tuned!