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    Categories: Credit

Can You Really Repair Your Own Credit?

There is one hard truth that you need to know – there is no such thing as a quick fix or repair for your credit. Any negative yet accurate information will stay on your credit report for a maximum of 7 to 10 years.

If you are planning to restore your credit score or clean up your credit, there is probably no need for you to hire the services of a credit repair agency or company. The good news is that you can get everything fixed on your own for free without having to pay for expensive credit score repair or rebuilding programs.

The only thing you have to do is follow a few simple and easy steps to restore and repair your credit.

5 Key Steps to Restore and Repair Your Credit

Below are the 5 important steps that will help you on your way to repairing your credit or restoring it to how it used to be in the past:

  1. Check and ensure that every piece of information stated on all of your credit reports is correct and accurate.
  2. Get rid of all the collection notices that you can find on the public records section of the credit report.
  3. Cut down all of your revolving credit balances such as lines of credit, overdraft, and credit cards to less than 75% of your credit limits. Afterward, you can further lower it to less than 50%.
  4. See to it that you have a good amount of available credit that you don’t use at the moment. In the event that you got bad credit and you don’t have any kind of credit for now, you might want to apply for cash secured credit card that can help in rebuilding your credit.
  5. Develop a good history. This is best done by making sure that you pay your debts right on time and ensure that you don’t have any late payments.

How Low Will It Take to Repair Your Credit?

Typically, credit reporting agencies update their records once every month. This means that if you do something to make your credit better, it is normal for you to expect to wait for one to two months before these changes get reflected in your credit score and on your credit report.

In case your credit report contains negative information, you often need to wait for this information to be removed seven years following the occurrence of the negative event such as having a super late payment or missing a payment. Based on the two factors, it should give you a good idea of when you can expect the change to appear or reflect on your credit score.

The best things that you can do for dramatic improvement of your credit score in a matter of one to two months is to clean up your credit report’s public records section, pay down a significant amount of your debt if you are nearing your credit limits, or get the credit bureau or a creditor to stop reporting the negative information that is already over 7 years old.

Here you can get a complete guide about how to repair your credit in just 30 days.

 

Jonathan Restrepo: Jonathan Restrepo writes about consumer credit for Creditmergency. He's passionate about helping others achieve financial freedom, so he dedicates his free time to learn about personal finance. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, MarketWatch, USA Today and MSN Money, and on the Associated Press wire.
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