5 Quick and Easy Steps to Do Credit Repair yourself

In this tough economy, when every dollar counts, it is crucial to learn how to do credit repair yourself. Each and every day, thousands of desperate people are needlessly running to credit repair agencies spending hundreds, even thousands of dollars trying to get their credit up to par.

But it really isn’t that difficult at all to repair credit yourself if you know the basic things that most credit repair services would otherwise do for you for a fee.

If you aren’t aware of those simple actions, here are 5 quick and easy steps to do credit repair yourself.

1. Access a copy of your credit report – you are entitled to a copy of your credit report for free once a year. You can access it in the mail, by phone, or even online. Although you get this free credit report, be sure to also get your credit scores along with your report, as this is the foundation for doing credit repair for yourself.

2. Check your credit report for errors – this is one of the biggest factors that credit repair agencies bank on – the mistakes that can you easy remove yourself while you’re in the process of credit repair. Look for wrong addresses, wrong social security numbers, accounts with balances that you’ve already paid off, and even accounts with late payments that were actually made on time.

3. Negotiate account payoffs – here’s another area that you are typically charged for by credit repair agencies which you can avoid by doing the credit repair yourself. All you have to do is call your creditors on collection or past due accounts and ask them to settle with you. Just let them know that you will pay off the balance, but that you are only able to pay a certain amount. If the creditor agrees, you have just saved a few hundred dollars and you now have a zero balance on that account.

4. Raise your credit limits – you may be asking yourself, “How can raising your credit limits help when you are doing credit repair yourself?” The magic about this is that 30 percent of your credit score is directly impacted by the balance on your account compared to the limit on that account. So there is only two ways to change this aspect of your credit score. Either you pay down the balance or you raise up the credit limit. Either can give you an equal result when doing credit repair yourself.

5. Continue monitoring your credit score – here’s where most people miss it big time. They take the initial actions to repair their credit themselves, but then they never follow up to be certain that those actions really helped their credit scores. That’s the pitfall of doing credit repair yourself; you may not have a good system for following through until you get the results in your credit that you are looking for. The best tool to use here is a calendar and simply putting reminders every one to two months to check your credit report and credit scores again.

As you can see, these are all simple steps that will guide you along the way to do the credit repair yourself. If you can do these 5 simple steps, then you have just saved yourself hundreds of dollars by not having others do it for you.