Credit Repair: 3 Things to Do to Repair Your Bad Credit

Published by DBascombe at March 1, 2021

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Credit repair is essential to helping you qualify for a home mortgage and to save money on loans, credit cards, and insurance. In fact, those are just a few of the reasons to seek out credit repair. A better credit score can also get you new employment opportunities, even a promotion or raise from your current employer. If you’ve ever thought about starting your own business or just want to feel secure in knowing you can borrow money whenever you need it, a good credit score is a useful thing to have.

If you’ve been wondering what is involved in credit repair, here are the initial steps that you need to take to get started:

1. Obtain the Latest Copies of Your Credit Reports

Before you can start repairing your credit, you need to know what’s in your credit reports that needs to be address. There you will find all of the mistakes that you made and errors that led to your bad credit.

You can obtain free credit reports annually from each of the three credit bureaus every year. Via AnnualCreditReport.com, you can obtain your credit reports from Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion.

2. Review Your Credit Reports for Errors

Once you have the credit reports, go over them carefully. Pay close attention to each of your accounts and any items that have been listed in public record, such as a bankruptcy, as well as the inquiries that have been made to your credit report.

3. Figure Out What Needs to Be Fixed

Here are the types of information in your credit report you’ll need to repair:

Inaccurate information, including accounts that don’t belong to you, payments that have been erroneously reported as late.
Past due accounts that have late payments listed, charged off, or sent for collections.
Maxed-out accounts that exceed your credit limit

As you go through this information, dispute the errors that are on your credit report, pay down the past due accounts, and decrease your credit utilization on the maxed-out accounts. Be prepared for this process to take awhile as credit repair is something that doesn’t happen overnight. However, as you address the issues on your credit reports, your credit score will improve over time.