There are a lot
of reasons why you might want to look at your credit report. Obtaining a
copy of your credit report is the best way to see if you've been a
victim of identity fraud. It's also a great way to keep tabs on your
credit score. If you check your credit report often then you'll be able
to continually monitor your credit activity may or may not be from your
own doing. The old days of lowering your credit
score by checking it frequently are gone if you buy a credit
monitoring service instead of applying for loans or credit cards just so
you can obtain a free copy of your credit report. These new credit
monitoring services do not count as a credit inquiry because you are not
checking your credit in connection with applying for credit with a
company, you are just watching your credit for errors or possible fraud.
With credit monitoring you can check your credit as often as you would
like without any effect whatsoever on your credit score if anything it
can save your score by catching mistakes or by catching fraud early. There are
various credit monitoring programs out there ranging in price from about
10.00 to 25.00 a month. We recommend True Credit or Privacy Matters for credit
monitoring services. It's well worth the $14.95 price tag, and the
piece of mind you can have by knowing your credit is under your own
watchful eye. True Credit offers an instant credit report and
score plus monitoring.
Is Credit Repair for Real?
Beyond identity theft fraud risks you are more likely to miss paying a bill for
reasons unrelated to fraud such as your bill not making it to your house, and you don't find out
that you've missed a payment until after your credit
report has a 30 day late ding which can haunt you bad dream for many years to come.
Another common credit mistake is going out of town on vacation or business and there's that one
credit card, loan payment, phone or utility bill that you forgot about.
When you come home you find a letter stating your 30 days overdue and they've marked your credit
report accordingly. It's a very frustrating thing to have happen because
creditors view that as a sign of weakness on your part even though you may have had the money to pay
the bill, all they see is that you didn't. If you have access to the Internet, then you have access to
your credit report as often as you would like through a credit monitoring service so you can watch your own credit
as frequently as you feel necessary.
If you have damaged your credit by accident or if you've found yourself in between
jobs and weren't able to pay some or all of your bills for period of time then you may want to try
using a professional credit repair service such as Lexington Law which has
proven to be able to legally assist you in repairing that damage to your credit
report for reasonable fees.
What Lexington Law actually does is dispute items on your credit report.
You are probably familiar with how creditors will sell debts to bill collectors
who then try to recover funds. Quite often these bill collectors don't
stay in business long and aren't around to respond to disputes on your credit
report and no response means you win and can get those items removed from your
credit report. This results in a higher credit score because you no longer
have that particular negative mark bringing your credit rating down.
Sometimes if you've made a late payment to a particular
creditor and they negatively mark your credit, but you later continue to pay on
time they will remove that late mark from your credit because you continued to
pay off the loan or credit card. In either case it's always worth trying
to dispute negative items on your credit report, you may not be able to remove
everything, but chances are you can remove a lot of those old negative marks
affecting your credit. It's a very worthwhile investment. Click on
the link below to find out more about Lexington Law's credit repair
opportunities
Whatever you decide to do make sure you do something, because
doing nothing has never been an answer to anyone's credit woes. They
always say, hindsight is 20/20 so don't wait until your credit has taken a
beating to act.
The below link is for Privacy Matters which is another credit monitoring service like True Credit, but offers a 30 day trial,
even though the link says it's free it's actually $1.00 which is pretty
unbeatable so if you're not sure you want to commit to True Credit's $14.95 a
month then this is the way to go. Privacy Matters is around $15.00
per month if you don't cancel within 30 days.
