Adding A 100 Word Statement Will Not Repair A Bad Credit Score
- By Stuart Hunter
- Published November 9, 2009
- Credit
- Unrated
Stuart Hunter
Providing credit repair services since 1991, Lexington Law has helped over 500,000 clients legally take on their credit and backs up the claim that they are "the trusted leaders in credit repair."
View all articles by Stuart Hunter
Negative items on credit reports have some of the biggest effects on your credit score. A few delinquent payments can be the difference between getting a good interest rate on a loan and being required to make a large down payment in order to even qualify for financing. Major derogatory items like charged off accounts, repossessions, and bankruptcies have the potential to drop your credit score so much that you will have difficulty getting approved for credit, regardless of the terms.
So what are the options if there are damaging listings on a credit report that shouldn't be there? Credit reporting mistakes do happen and negative listings are incorrectly added to consumers' credit reports very frequently. And what about negative listings that are accurate but there was a legitimate reason behind them? Is it fair to have to deal with a low credit score for up to ten years when the dark spots in your credit history were completely outside your control?
The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) provides consumers with a few options for dealing with poor credit, and enforcing their right to a fair and accurate credit score. This includes your right to request free copies of your credit reports so you can see what information is being reported about you as well as the right to request verification of items on your credit reports that you feel may be inaccurate, untimely, misleading, incomplete, ambiguous, unverifiable,
biased or unclear.
Another antiquated option you have as a result of this act is the right to add a 100 word statement to your credit reports explaining to creditors the circumstances behind negative items on your credit reports. The idea is that when looking at your credit reports, lenders will be able to take into account the justification behind these negative listings when considering a loan application.
What makes this statement antiquated is that these days, lenders rarely consider the individual items in your credit reports. In fact, they may never see your reports at all so your carefully crafted 100-one hundred word statements would never be read.
On top of that, lenders are most interested in your credit score, which does not take the one hundred word statement into account. No matter how reasonable your justification is for having a negative listing on your credit reports, your credit score will remain unchanged.
The only way to prevent negative items from affecting your credit score is to have them removed from your credit report. One option people have for attempting to do this is the credit bureau dispute described in the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Additional credit repair options are made available through a number of other consumer protection acts targeted towards creditors and collections agencies.
So what are the options if there are damaging listings on a credit report that shouldn't be there? Credit reporting mistakes do happen and negative listings are incorrectly added to consumers' credit reports very frequently. And what about negative listings that are accurate but there was a legitimate reason behind them? Is it fair to have to deal with a low credit score for up to ten years when the dark spots in your credit history were completely outside your control?
The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) provides consumers with a few options for dealing with poor credit, and enforcing their right to a fair and accurate credit score. This includes your right to request free copies of your credit reports so you can see what information is being reported about you as well as the right to request verification of items on your credit reports that you feel may be inaccurate, untimely, misleading, incomplete, ambiguous, unverifiable,
Another antiquated option you have as a result of this act is the right to add a 100 word statement to your credit reports explaining to creditors the circumstances behind negative items on your credit reports. The idea is that when looking at your credit reports, lenders will be able to take into account the justification behind these negative listings when considering a loan application.
What makes this statement antiquated is that these days, lenders rarely consider the individual items in your credit reports. In fact, they may never see your reports at all so your carefully crafted 100-one hundred word statements would never be read.
On top of that, lenders are most interested in your credit score, which does not take the one hundred word statement into account. No matter how reasonable your justification is for having a negative listing on your credit reports, your credit score will remain unchanged.
The only way to prevent negative items from affecting your credit score is to have them removed from your credit report. One option people have for attempting to do this is the credit bureau dispute described in the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Additional credit repair options are made available through a number of other consumer protection acts targeted towards creditors and collections agencies.