A 100 Word Statement Will Not Repair Your Credit Rating

A 100 Word Statement Will Not Repair Your Credit Rating

Negative listings on your credit reports make some of the largest hits to your credit score. A handful of delinquent payments can be the difference between getting approved for a good interest rate on a mortgage or other type of loan and being required to make a substantial down payment in order to even qualify for financing. Major blemishes like charged off accounts, repossessions, and foreclosures 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's a person to do if there are negative items on a credit file that shouldn't be there? Errors do happen and negative information gets incorrectly added to peoples' credit reports all the time. And what about negative listings that are accurate but there was a perfectly good reason behind them? Is it fair to require that you live with a bad credit score for up to ten years or more when the damaging listings on your credit reports were completely out of your control?

The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) gives consumers a few options for dealing with bad credit, and enforcing their right to a fair and accurate credit score. This includes the right to order free copies of your credit reports as well as the right to dispute 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 the Fair Credit Reporting Act is the ability to add a one hundred 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 your loan application.

What makes this statement antiquated is that these days, lenders rarely look at the individual listings in your credit reports. In fact, they may never see your reports at all so your meticulously penned 100-one hundred word statements would never be read.

On top of that, lenders are primarily interested in your credit score, which does not take the 100 word statement into account. No matter how reasonable your justification is for having a negative item 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.

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About The Author
Since 1991, Lexington Law has been helping clients legally dispute the questionable negative items in their credit reports and Lexington Law's credit repair services have assisted clients with the removal of millions of these negative listings. See LexingtonLaw.com for more information.

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