Regardless of your track record or credit history, you can take some simple steps and do your own credit repair. You can begin right away, and it won't cost you anything - but the improvement can be gigantic!



The first step is to get copies of your credit report, read them, and understand them. There are three credit reporting agencies, and there can be differences in your file between them.

The law now provides consumers the right to one free credit report from each of the bureaus, Experian, TransUnion, and Equfax. You are entitled to one from each company every year.

The FTC, or Federal Trade Commission has a website set up specifically for this: annualcreditreport.com. This is the "official" site for these free reports - be wary of any other offers for "free" credit reports, as they won't actually be free.

You'll start your credit repair efforts as soon as you get your reports. To begin with, you want to read each report line by line.

These reports will either include a "dispute" form, or give you a web address to get them. This is the key where you will begin to fix your credit.

Make a note of each and every entry that is either incorrect, outdated, or inaccurate. For each of these, you will be filing a dispute. You will want to list why the entry should be removed, such as a debt that has already been paid but hasn't yet been removed.

Each credit reporting agency has up to 30 days to either verify the information, or they must remove it by law. Even if the information is accurate, if they don't verify it in time, it gets removed.

With just this simple step, some of these negative entries will be removed from your credit report. They will no longer contribute to a low credit score, and your score will immediately go up - sometimes by hundreds of points!