The Importance of Debt Repair and How to Manage It
Access to credit on fair terms is one of the things in life that gives you freedom and flexibility. If you want to borrow money for a car, home, or college education, you want to be able to get a good interest rate, assuming that you’re eligble for the loan in the first place. The credit history tells a story about you, about whether you can be trusted to pay back money that you borrow in a timely manner.
The better your credit history, the easier it will be to get loans and usually the better your interest rate will be. If your credit history is problematic, perhaps due to unpaid medical bills, defaulted credit cards, or auto repossession, you will have a very difficult time getting credit, particularly at a good interest rate. But you can repair your debt history, making it easier for you to get good credit terms in the future.
Debt repair is the process in which a person attempts to reestablish their status as a good credit risk. The first step is accessing credit reports from the three major credit reporting agencies: Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. By law, every American is allowed free access to his or her credit report from each of these three bureaus once per year. You are also entitled to a free copy of your credit report if you have been turned down for a loan because of info in your report.
Once you have your credit reports, you should read them carefully and look for any errors. Up to 25% of consumers have mistakes on their reports that are serious enough to cause them to be denied credit. Obviously, the first step is disputing what you believe are mistakes on your credit reports. Even if your credit history is less than stellar, you don’t want mistakes on your report making matters worse.
While you can’t have accurate information taken out from your credit report, you can ask for the credit bureau to reinvestigate information that may be incomplete or wrong. This is something they have to do for free, though there are services that will do the legwork for you for a fee.
If your credit report is accurate, but negative information is due to circumstances beyond your control, such as catastrophic medical expenses, you can, with evidence of steady income and lack of other credit problems, ask the bureaus to amend your report. Whether they agree or not depends on such things as the length of your credit history, and evidence of creditworthiness on other lines of credit on which you have not defaulted.
The best method to “repair” credit is to minimize damage in the first place. If you have lost your job and find yourself unable to meet minimum payment amounts on credit cards or other loans, you should contact your creditors. Often, they are willing to work with customers who make a good faith effort to avoid financial disaster and bankruptcy. If you inform them of the situation early, they’re more likely to work with you than if you let the situation get really bad before contacting them.
Because access to credit is necessary for most people to buy houses and cars, debt repair is the key to recovering from a poor credit rating and qualifying for better terms on loans and mortgages. Poor credit means you can be stuck paying enormous interest rates, which makes it harder to pay those loans back, which is more likely to compound the problem than resolve it.
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