The Truth About Credit Repair
Greg Vogel | June 16, 2009Contrary to what creditors and the credit bureaus would like you to believe, credit repair does work and can work for 100% of people in most circumstances. This is, of course, provided you are getting the best advice and have an experienced professional working on your case. Anyone with a credit score below 720 can benefit long-term from the advice and information provided through credit repair; however, there are times when your own limitations make adhering to this advice impossible.
The two limiting factors are:
(1) your financial situation, and
(2) the time frame within you need to reach your results.
It is possible to remove anything from a credit report, even accurate items, if the creditor does not adhere to the law that outlines what needs to be done and by when. Just because you have a certain type of account removed at one time does not mean that other, similar items are going to be able to be removed, even with the same circumstances. A hit-or-miss aspect exists in credit repair, because credit repair relies not only on the strategies of the person attempting to repair the credit, but also on the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of the creditors and credit bureaus in adhering to the laws.
The reason credit repair has received such a bad name is due to the abundance of scam artists who flock to the easy money made available by people desperate for this type of service. This unfortunate reality leads the credit bureaus and the FTC to make blanket, untrue statements such as, “Credit repair does not work ever and there is nothing a credit repair company can do for you that you can’t do for yourself.” Given that more than 90% of credit repair companies are scam artists, promising the world and then disappearing when you pay, the credit bureaus and the FTC are forced to make such bold statements. It would be impossible for them to explain the truth to consumers without causing them to make a bad choice that would result in the getting scammed. As a result, the credit bureaus and the FTC must adhere to the “credit repair does not work” position.
As I have stated, credit repair does work, but…don’t let anyone tell you that credit repair is effective every time. Its success varies with the number of players in the game, some of whom never perform consistently.
Even if you have a true master of credit repair on your side, you have to take into account that sometimes the other players perform in a way that throws your master of his game. Sometimes the opposing side shows up strong, other times they don’t. Even if you follow the same approach with every situation that arises when doing credit repair, your results will still vary due to the other players involved.
So the next time someone tells you they can get everything repaired on your credit, run the other way, because, at best, the pendulum will swing widely both ways for the same situation!