Defining Credit Repair

Credit repair as practiced by most credit repair companies is limited to sending frivolous disputes to credit bureaus, creditors and collectors for a very low monthly fee.

Usually all derogatory accounts, collections and public records are disputed. The disputes are mailed by the credit repairer and are distinctly formatted (colored fonts, canned disputes) to get the client flagged by the credit bureaus as frivolous disputer.  Of course fewer CRA corrections result in greater profits for the credit repairers as the clients continue to pay for more frivolous disputes.

I posted some examples of “proprietary” credit repair letters from “law firms” such as Lexington Law and Bradley Ross Law (until recently controlled by Stephen Snyder).  Additional information about credit repair companies is at Fight Back!!!

CreditFactors is NOT credit repair, but LEGALLY making the best of your credit.

It’s NOT about DELETIONS.

Deletions can seriously lower FICO scores.  Additionally, the Fair Credit Reporting Act requires ACCURATE reporting and as I have documented countless times, ACCURATE reporting of old accounts with late payments and even charge-offs can dramatically increase FICO scores.

I will be posting specific examples at the blog and I hope that many credit repairers will not only read and learn, but also contribute and document FICO scoring bugs and systemic credit reporting violations.

Credit Repair – the get rich quick scams

I’m inundated with SPAM, advertising how easy it is to start a credit repair business.  Numerous companies offer software supposedly making it easy to get rich quick by paying low monthly fees — NO knowledge about credit required.

I checked out some of the credit repair software and you couldn’t PAY me to use it.

None of the credit repair software I reviewed imports the data from the myFICO credit reports and it instead required MANUAL data entry.   My clients’ credit rating is too important to allow for mistakes by data entry people.  ONE incorrect digit can ruin a client’s FICO scores.  To make matters worse, all software lacked the data fields for the MOST IMPORTANT data.

Designing FUNCTIONAL credit analysis software

Since 1/07 I’ve been looking for someone to write software to analyze the myFICO credit reports.  It is not rocket science to develop software to automate imports, calculate the balance/limit ratios for various account types and to flag OBVIOUSLY incorrect data such as balances higher than the highest amount owed.

Several credit repair people contacted me, claiming to want to develop this “wonderful” software.  Unfortunately, they were just trying to get me to work for free. It never ceases to amaze me how many scammers there are.

I have yet to hear from anyone willing and able to invest in this rather basic program and it looks like I’ll just have to take the time to do it myself — maybe next winter.

Now I’m so discouraged and I wasted so much time, I require a $100 advance payment from credit repairers for an introductory 1 hour consultation (subscribers are of course exempt) .  However, if you are in the software development business, I’ll be glad to discuss a joint venture or any other possibilities.

If you’re thinking about starting a credit repair business, I highly recommend NOT using any software touted for credit repair unless it imports the myFICO reports and has the capability to be used offline or at least contains an export function so that you don’t have to continue to use the software.   If you think you found usable credit repair software, please let me know and I’ll check it out.

For 8 years I’ve been using the same forum software and it beats anything on the market.

I set up a private forum for each client and I have complete control to create and arrange unlimited topics and subtopics.  My standard topics include a topic for each report’s FICO score factors, inquiries, open accounts, each derogatory account, collection and lien and then topics according to the client’s needs.  If I draft the disputes, that’s a new folder with the draft for bureau in a topic, a topic for general dispute issues and then the results, etc.

For long term clients I create a folder for FICO scores and a “DONE” folder for corrected/deleted accounts and completed discussion.

Since every topic can have unlimited subtopics, it’s easy to keep track of issues relating to individual accounts.  An extremely important feature is the capability to annotate each topic, making it easy to see at a glance where we stand and what needs to be done.

It is time consuming to have to copy/paste each problem account from the myFICO reports, but it is still an awful lot faster than RETYPING the myFICO report data — as required by all credit repair software I’ve seen.