One of the hot topics of today is credit repair; “repair your credit score” is one of the most searched terms in Google.

Whether you have a foreclosure that wasn’t discharged correctly, late payments on a credit card that your ex-boyfriend owned, or a charge off that happened when you were going through a divorce, fixing your credit is your only hope to improve your situation.

Here are three methods of credit repair repair your credit score that are available

1) Seek a non profit agency

Whether you live in New Orleans, New York or New Mexico, all cities and towns have not for profit (non-profit) agencies that help people with their financial problems. They are available as counseling services rather than institutions that charge money to improve your situation. They don’t offer consolidation loans or home equity loans instead they offer advice.

2) Do Credit Repair – Repair Your Credit Score Yourself

Even the top experts say that anyone can do credit repair repair you credit  score by writing dispute letters to the three bureaus that calculate scores. Moreover, each of these three bureaus have sites that allow you to dispute that foreclosure, medical bills and collections online. Just beware, writing dispute letters have proven to be more effective than using the bureaus online portals.

3) Seek a Repair Company as Your Last Option

There are multiple organization and companies that advertise that they can help you with deleting negative items from your credit quickly at a low cost. However, most aren’t able to back up their claims of fast and inexpensive repair. Instead the quality of their services is poor and they often times don’t even deliver on their promise of credit repair repair your credit score.

Credit can be bad for a variety of reasons: late payments high account balances bankruptcy collections charge-offs to minimize negative on your factors you will need to pay down balances, make payments on time, dispute incorrect information, and let the passing of time lessen the impact of past bad credit.

If you have old collections on your credit report, paying them off now can actually hurt your credit. Credit agencies look at the age of a delinquent item: if you pay it off the date of last activity becomes recent instead of old. There are many reputable credit repair agencies or credit counselors that can help guide you in restoring your credit.

There are many things you can do to either help or hurt your credit score. Your credit report is based upon information that is reported to the three main credit bureaus, transunion, Equifax, and Experian, by credit companies whom you have an account with. The credit bureaus also obtain information about accounts you have in collections, and judgments you have against you.

Derogatory accounts such as collections accounts or judgments will also greatly affect your credit score. One collection account can drop your score as much as 50 points or more once it reports.

Some credit reporting agencies have simulators that can manipulate credit reports to see if you can improve your fico scores. Some simulations that you can do are: paying down or paying off debt, removing collections, paying off collections and satisfying liens. Sometimes the simulations don’t improve your score and sometimes the simulation can actually lower your score. But, sometimes the simulations can improve your score enough to get you approved for a loan. There is a small cost but, if it can help you get a home, it is worth it.

Be careful when paying off old collections. As soon as they are paid off, then become current and may potentially have a negative effect on your score. It is best to have it paid off in escrow after funding.

There are many attorney’s who specialize in using the fair credit act to appeal accounts and errors on reports to maximize the score. In some cases utilizing these attorneys can be a great help if all negotiations fail. An account marked paid in full barely does anything to a score. The complete removal of collections or delinquent accounts is the best way to get a positive score increase.

Look at accounts with active balances. Make sure that all of these accounts are accurate and are yours. You may find accounts placed for collections that you were not aware of. Take care of these accounts to help improve your credit score.

Your report my be wrong, or more diplomatically, your credit report may contain inconsistencies or inaccuracies. One of the most common things we see on credit reports is account closed by credit grantor. This is considered a negative, it’s what someone would write about you if you didn’t pay your debts in a timely fashion and you were being sent to collections. But we see this a lot on a store card you signed up for to get the 20% discount, never used, and never even activated. It’s very easy to get this changed to the more positive account closed by consumer and get a score improvement of anywhere from two to 20 points or more depending on the quality and quantity of the account being corrected (and you can ask us to do this for you if repairing your credit seems like something you’d rather not get involved with)