Validating Your Debts

People looking for ways to clean up their credit reports sometimes turn to credit repair services because they promise to dispute your bad credit and have it taken care of for you in no time. What a lot of them don’t realize is that many of these services will simply take your money and dispute every negative account in your profile, in the hopes that one of them might fall off. As you can imagine, this isn’t exactly the best way to go about improving your credit score. Disputing every account on your credit report not only is a waste of time (unless the account you’re disputing is actually inaccurate), and in some cases can land you in a world of trouble. If there’s a collection on your report, and you dispute the account information, you’ll not only have wasted time and money, but you could open yourself up to lawsuits by claiming an account isn’t your own. So what’s the better method for cleaning up your credit history? If you’ve got accounts and debts on your file that you don’t recognize, don’t dispute them – validate them with a debt validation letter. Rather than claiming information about an account is inaccurate and refusing to take care of it, find out the creditor or collector’s contact information (usually listed in the report) and write them a letter requesting verification of the debt, and that the collector provide proof that you owe the money, and that they have the right to collect it. If the collection agency is unable to verify the debt, problem solved. If they are able to verify it, your next course of action should be to set up some type of payment plan to get rid of the debt (and put an end to those annoying phone calls). Remember that debt validation letters are only a means of verifying an existing debt, not a way to eliminate the debt entirely. You shouldn’t try to validate a debt that you know for a fact is yours, as it could land you in deeper trouble with collectors.