Fixing a bad credit report is not a pleasant experience. There are basically two ways of going about the credit repair process.
Many people decide first to fix their own credit only to discover the process is much more involved than they expected. This is because they are trying to save a few dollars by going the inexpensive route.
First, there is a great deal of legalese you need to learn when fixing your credit. For instance you will have to learn your rights under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act and so on.
If you are not the type of person who enjoys legal research in your free time, or don’t have patience for translating wordy statutes and confusing case laws from around the country, then this might not be for you. But if you are determined enough to plow through the stacks of law books, then you should expect to spend at least a a few Sunday afternoons researching applicable credit laws at your local library.
Once you have waded through the stacks of law books and thoroughly irritated your local librarian, you will need to draft a good dispute letter. Even if you have some decent writing chops, this type of letter takes a unique method to be effective.
Specifically, a good credit bureau dispute letter must contain certain elements, and must be silent as to other elements. Your dispute letter will be ignored if not drafted properly. If you write the letter incorrectly, the bureaus will probably throw your dispute in the garbage and you have to start all over.
Assuming you can draft a decent letter, then comes the easy part. The easy part is to mail the letters. You will need to send them certified, which means you have to physically take them to the post office.
By now you are probably wishing you had more free time. Mailing dispute letters via certified mail takes a lot of time. Unless you are extremely casual about how you spend your free time, this is probably not worth your time.
Disputing your credit without the help of an attorney takes a great deal of organization. Assuming you are trying to remove more than a single bad credit item, you will have to stay on top of the progress of your case. To make sure the bureaus or creditors did not ignore your dispute, you will need to create a spreadsheet to track the results of each dispute and negotiation.
Does this sound overwhelming? Do it yourself credit correction is overwhelming and intimidating especially if you are not highly organized. So, unless you are dedicated to becoming an expert in the federal statutes, the issue is not can you afford credit repair services, but rather can you afford NOT to seek help from an affordable qualified attorney.