Bad things happen to good people. You have bad credit… well that is the past so get over it! You need to make a change now. Don’t look at what happened to you and have it go over and over in your head. Break that broken record. That will only cause more stress then you can handle and additional headaches.

You need to take action now and move forward in your life with a new attitude and eliminate bad credit scores.

Check your Credit Report

Your first step is to pull your credit report to see what the damage is. There are three credit bureaus that collect data on you: TransUnion, Equifax and Experian.

You need to receive a report from each of the three agencies to see what they are saying about you. A lot of times, they have incorrect info on you, but it is your responsibility to tell them.

Each bureau is required to provide you with one free credit report per year if you request. Here is a link to receive a copy of the free credit report from each of the credit agencies:

https://www.annualcreditreport.com/cra/order?mail

The Free credit reports only provide the details of the credit report, which is really all you need to make corrections. They do charge small fees if you want to get your score.

Is Good Info Missing…?

Each agency can have different information of each of the credit reports. So check each one carefully. If you have, one lender which you are paying timely but is not listed on the credit report, write the lender and tell them to report it to the agency which it is not showing on their report. If the lender won’t do this, write to the credit bureau with proof of statements and cancelled checks and the credit agency should post it to the credit report.

Re-aging

If you have an account which you were current for the last 12 months, write to the lender and ask them to re-age your account. This way all the old late payments (over 12 months old) will be out of the calculation and improve your score.

Stay on Top of Things

Make sure you continue to check with each bureau to make sure everything is accurate at least once a year.

When you write to each credit agency, they will provide dispute id # to you and you can continue to dispute items until everything is accurate and they will send the detail credit report to you to check what they have updated for free.

Don’t use more than 50% of available credit on each credit card. Anything over that can reduce your score.

Be Patient

It takes awhile to do this but it will be worth it!

Thanks for reading and learning,

BRT Financial, Inc.

P.S. Improving your Credit score will get you a better financing rate for your Commercial Real Estate deal!

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