Your credit report is an essential document that you need to look at quite often since it has a significant influence on your present and future financial life.
If your report is full of negative items such as overdue bills, closed credit card accounts foreclosures, and repossession, you need to find a way of cleaning it up since the bad credit history may come to haunt you.
A bad credit history can make it hard to purchase a home, get an auto loan or even rent an apartment.
Sometimes, bad credit can lead to higher bills since service providers are legally allowed to charge you more for having a poor credit history. Luckily, it is possible to remove the negative information from your report especially if it is an error.
You don’t have to wait for seven or ten years for the item to fall off your report automatically. Here is how you can deal with the negative credit report information.
File a Dispute with the Credit Agency
If you take time to review your annual credit report, there is a significant chance that you will find some reporting errors that you need to deal with as soon as you can.
Perhaps, one of your past credit cards is listed as delinquent despite having paid off everything that you owed and closed the account appropriately.
If you do notice such inaccuracies on your credit report, then you can challenge them via the credit bureau that issued the report and wait for 30 days for a response.
However, you should be prepared to provide proof of your claims, and if you are right, you can be sure that the negative information will be deleted from your report.
Write a Goodwill Letter
If disputing the negative items doesn’t work (if the credit bureau proves that the errors are actually accurate) then the next thing you need to do is write a goodwill letter to the creditor requesting them to remove the negative entry from your report out of goodwill.
This is the most effective strategy when you are trying to remove paid collections, paid charge offs, a paid off bad credit loan, or late payments from your report.
The good thing is that a goodwill letter is quite easy to write. All you have to do is to explain your situation to the creditor or collection agency and request them to remove the negative information from your credit report.
While this may seem like something unrealistic, you will be surprised to learn that it actually works.
Negotiate for a “Pay for Delete” Offer
If the negative information captured on your credit report is accurate, you need to think outside the box to get rid of it.
One thing that you need to keep in mind is that a credit bureau won’t remove any accurate and verifiable information from your report even if you dispute it a thousand times.
But, the good news is that you can actually negotiate for some items to be removed from your report. In pay for delete offer, you will request the creditor to delete the negative information about you, and in exchange, you pay the full amount that you owe the creditor at once.
Some creditors will take up such an offer and write to the credit bureau requesting it to delete the negative information.
Consult with a Professional
Lastly, there are many independent credit repair agencies across Canada that can help you get rid of the negative information from your report.
However, you need to be aware that there is no guarantee from such agencies that they will succeed in removing the negative items from your report.
If you don’t know where to start while trying to clean up your report, it is always a good idea to work with a professional who will guide you through the entire process.