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Clean Up My Credit Report

danieldalessandro | Aug 27, 2009 | Views: 103 |

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Clean up my credit report! Clean up my credit report! This is what I hear from my clients all the time who come to me with credit problems and I usually tell them that they shouldn’t tell me, “clean up my credit report!” and rather they should be telling themselves to clean up their own credit report. To clean up a credit report the right way essentially involves correcting errors and making improvements that can only happen over a fairly extended period of time. A third party individual can advise someone on how to clean up their credit report but often times it just isn’t practical for the individual to do things like make consecutive payments for a number of months, or to slowly ask for increases on credit limits.

The actual person who owns the credit report should do things like this and only turn to a third-party for advice and for any immediate fixes that may be able to raise the credit score by a significant margin in a short period of time. These include things like fixing errors and resolving defaulted accounts, and while I don’t enjoy doing these things for my clients sometimes I must because they are simply unwilling to take action for such activities. Cleaning up a credit report doesn’t simply involve fixing or resolving all of the negatives that may be present such as late payments and defaulted accounts and rather it also involves education and learning.

What? Education and learning? Does this make sense? It does make sense because while credit counseling can help clean up a credit report it cannot continue to provide the individual with a continual service that is ongoing unless the person is willing to keep paying for such services. In reality it is much better to educate the individual on how to be responsible with their credit so that they don’t’ continue to make such mistakes and thus harm their credit as time moves on. It is also about teaching the person ways on how they can improve their credit score without having to put in more and more effort doing the wrong things.

I’ve found that once you teach most people who have bad credit what goes into establishing a credit score a good proportion of them absorb this knowledge to the extent that they don’t continue to make the same mistakes going forward. This is essentially what you want to happen because it is rather unfortunate when you continue to have make all of changes and resolutions for them. If the individual cannot learn to things on their own then they might eventually only have one option left and that is of course bankruptcy. This is obviously a last resort and it is something that you want to avoid at all costs if you can. It can provide debt relief to people who need it though, and I always keep it in mind when doing my credit counseling as this is sometimes the only way to clean up a credit report with success.

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