You Can Do-It-Yourself, But Why? Credit Repair is Serious Business
Repairing your credit is serious business. The stakes are quite high. Poor credit can cost additional thousands of dollars in interest paid for credit or, keep you from obtaining credit in the first place. Fixing your credit score must be done right or you may damage your ability to make any inroads. Think about it for a moment, do you have the emotional detachment to act professionally when your challenges have been denied by the credit bureaus? Do you know which items on your credit report can be challenged, which type of challenge is appropriate to make, or which items have the most impact on your credit score? These questions are important when you are dealing with the important task of repairing your credit. Sure, you can repair your own credit. You can go to your local book store and purchase a book that will guide you through the process. Many of these books spend many pages guiding you through sound financial practices before they even begin to approach credit repair solutions. They spend page after page telling you that you can do-it-yourself, that you don't need a credit repair firm to help you repair your credit. Finally, they present you with a general approach to credit repair and a set of generic letters that you can, by inserting your information, challenge the credit bureaus' reports. So what could be wrong with that? The real problem is that no case is absolutely average. Averages are fine for large groups but they fail to accurately reflect what individuals do. Without exception, I can guarantee that if you need credit repair that your individual case will be at variance from the so-called average case. If that is true, then the generic letters and average solutions proposed by the books will, in all probability, not be suited to your individual case. Because repairing one's credit will lead to increased financial gain, it is important to get it right the first time. If you don't you must be prepared to live with the consequences. If you send up too many red flags at the credit bureaus they have the legal right to refuse to investigate on the basis of the legitimacy of the claim in the first place. They are not required to investigate frivolous claims. Do you want to take the risk that an item that is potentially removable will remain on your credit report simply because you wrote the wrong letter? I like to think of it in these terms. When I have a leaky pipe in my basement, I call a plumber. Sure, I could fix the pipe myself but how many trips to the hardware store would I have to make? How much time would I spend doing the job that could have been spend more productively? How wet will I get? Then there will always be the gnawing suspicion that I didn't really do it right. Sure, I could fix the leak myself but I call the professional to do the job for me. I have confidence that the plumber will do it right. I don't represent myself if I need legal help, I call a lawyer. I could do my own taxes but I call my accountant. I could do many things myself but, if I want the job to be done right, I call a professional. Doesn't that just make sense?
Roger Passman is President of WDC Financial Services, Inc., a firm specializing in consumer credit repair. Visit WDC on the web at http://www.WDCFinancialServices.com