You Can Improve Your Credit Simply by Correcting Credit Errors

Three major credit bureaus control your financial life. Their policies determine your credit score, and, in turn, your credit determines if you get a personal loan. If your loan is denied, you are asked to contact these bureaus for the reasons. However, few people do.

The average American assumes that these three bureaus, also known as consumer reporting agencies, must be a government agency because they have so much information about everyone and are able to exert so much influence on consumer's financial life. However, these credit bureaus are private corporations who earn their profit by selling consumer reports, without the consumer's permission, to interested parties inquiring about their credit history.

Although consumers can dispute their credit score free and are required by law to get a response within 30 days, most fail to inquire why their loans are rejected or why their interest rates, when they do get loans, is so high. Consequently, since these agencies don't have to hire personnel to process the claims, this increases their profits. It also increases the percentage of errors in credit reports. In fact, statistics show that 79 percent of these credit reports have blatant errors.

Now that you understand how the credit system works and how it can accommodate huge errors, the best way to improve credit is simply by hiring a credit repair company to help you to challenge your credit score. While you can theoretically fix credit yourself, it is a long and arduous process, requiring lots of expertise in asking the right questions and negotiating a favorable response. This is why it is much less time consuming and nerve wracking, as well as much more efficacious, to hire an experienced credit repair company to do the work for you.

In order to find the best credit repair agency to assist you, you have to do more than use the telephone book or do an internet search. Once you have created a list of potential companies you would like to work for you, you have to screen them.

You can screen a credit repair agency by finding out how much experience it has in repairing credit. This can be done by reviewing customer testimonials and reading online reviews. An experienced company will have numerous customers who have had a significant number of items purged from their credit report.

Experience will also correlate with the length of time a company has been in business. Usually the longer it has been in business, the more experience it has in finding errors, disputing them, and having them removed. A company that has numerous complaints filed against it with the FTC will only be in business for a short time.

When trying to gauge experience and longevity, you can check with the Better Business Bureau on when the company started and how many customer complaints it has adequately addressed. A solid company will have an excellent track record of removing numerous items, of being in business for a long time, and of efficiently addressing any customer complaints. Finally, a reputable credit repair company will have affordable fees that you can pay as you go, while a scam outfit will ask for thousands of dollars up front. Consider it a warning sign if a credit repair service is front-loading its fees.