Taking Care of Charge Offs on Your Credit

Finance Articles | January 3, 2009

Charge offs kill your credit scores. Take care of them the legal way and increase your credit scores!

No matter how low your credit scores may be, repairing your credit is possible. In the case of charge offs, although these can stay on your credit report for 7 years if you don’t seek repair measures, doing repair job can take it off the report without waiting for the 7 years. It is also easier to remove charge off if the debt has been paid.

To remove charge offs, follow these simple steps.

First, dispute charge offs. This is the easiest and most common way to have a charge-off removed from your report. As a consumer, it is your legal right as provided for in the Fair Credit Reporting Act to dispute any inaccurate information on your credit report.

Second, write the credit bureaus. State your intention to dispute the charge off in no uncertain terms and furnish all credit reporting agencies with the same letter. For more clarity, and to avoid any misunderstanding, mark or highlight the report item that you are disputing.

Within 30 days from the date you lodged your dispute, the credit bureaus must investigate your account and inform the creditor, or entity which now handles your account about the dispute. Once the 30 days has lapsed after the complaint and no validation has been made, the charge off must be removed from your report.

Third, follow up with the credit bureaus. Many times credit bureaus will not just remove items from your credit so make sure to follow through with phone calls.

IF, after all your work, and the waiting, your credit scores have not improved, hire a credit repair company or law firm. Some have suggested that credit bureaus are more responsive to professionals because they know and understand the credit laws better than average consumers.

Fortunately for the consumers, there are laws that can be employed as basis for lodging a complaint or a dispute to offset biases of the credit system. So if somebody will ask if it is possible to repair a bad credit? Yes it is, if you are willing to spend a little time and effort. Truly, it can take many months to a year or more. But the effort will always pay off in the end.

Article Tags: Credit Bureaus

Source: Free Articles from ArticlesFactory.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Shayne Sherman is the author of My-Credit-Story.com the consumer credit repair blog. If you have more credit repair questions please visit the consumer credit forums.