If you have ever shopped credit repair, you know it is not cheap. Credit repair companies and credit repair attorneys are expensive. The process is going to cost you at least $250 on the low side to work with either one.
There are a lot of loan officers that will refer you to a credit repair company because the loan officer receives a "referral fee" for sending you to that company. I know this for a fact because I receive a lot of emails every day from different credit repair companies that want me to refer my bad credit clients to them.
Often, when I get these emails I will call the company and ask them what they charge. Typically, the fee is going to be around $600 for an individual or $900 for a couple. I have seen one service that charges a $99 set up fee and then $89/month for three months. Another charges a $19 set up fee and then $39/month, but they don't tell you how many months. There is one that i saw that charges $1500 to dispute 4 items and if you want to dispute more, they require you to cut off your arm and send it to them with a couple shirts off your back too. (Just kidding on that last one!! The first part is true!) If you want to dispute more than four items, the fee just goes up from there. These fees are just plain stupid when you consider how easy it is to repair your credit on your own.
I have helped people with credit repair that have had 30 things they needed to dispute, so you can see how that can get expensive really fast. But you can get it done for free. There are two ways you can get it done for free. First, you can do all the research and do it on your own. Second, you can get your loan officer to help you and save you the time of all the research.
Most loan officers know how to do credit repair. The fact is however that many of them don't want to do it because it is time consuming and they are not guaranteed you will come back to them for a loan or that your credit will improve enough that they will be able to get you a loan when the process is complete.
You need to find a loan officer who will help you and they are out there. I have talked with plenty of loan officers that have been helping their clients for years by creating the credit repair letters the client needs.
Loan officers that try to get a referral fee by sending you to a credit repair company do not seem to me that they are looking out for their customer. Here is the deal. Getting the customer the loan is the most important thing and the commission from providing the loan is going to typically range from $1000 to $5000. Why do they need to hit the customer for another $200 from the referral fee they can get by sending you to a certain business? It seems to me that loan officers who do that are not looking out for your best interest because you could have gotten your credit repair done for that much less.
Loan officers understand that you might not know how to go about the process. Credit is not something the normal person is going to deal with every day. Loan professionals do deal with credit every day. They know how to read the credit report. You can go over your credit report with them so that they can create the correct letters you need to dispute the right things on your credit report. The key is that you find a good loan officer who is willing to help.
You might have to check in the yellow pages and call around to see who is willing to help you. One thing you must do is get a copy of your credit report from whatever lender pulled it most recently. You should be able to do this, but you might have to request a copy of your report from somewhere else and you must be willing and able to pay for that report. Once you have a copy of your report and a loan officer willing to help, you are half way there.
About the Author:
Matthew Wierzbinski has created a self help credit repair tool.
http://www.creditrepairgarage.com. This tool will allow you to create "everything" you need to repair your credit in about 10 to 20 minutes. You will not find any easier way to create all your dispute letters. Check it out.
No. of Times this article has been viewed :
221
Date Published :
Oct 28 2008