Well, I ran my first credit report with Experian (paid the $15 for the report with score) and found that I have a score of 568 with a bunch of late payments and only one Derog....which is a $78 charge by AFNI (Verizon) for an account I'm almost sure was paid off years ago. While online with my report, I disputed my AFNI charge along with some addresses and versions of my name that are misspelled....hopefully disputing those items don't cause me any problems. So it seems like most of my negative items are late payments with accounts I currently have...along with a couple that are closed. So here are my questions: 1) Has anyone dealt with AFNI before? Did I do the right thing by disputing that online? 2) How do I proceed with reports of 30/60/120 with accounts that I currently have? 3) How do I proceed with reports of 30/60/120 with old accounts that are closed? 4) I just purchased my report with Experian...should I go to the other two and purchase those as well and follow the same procedures as I did with Experian? 5) How often should I purchase my credit reports to check on the progress? Is there a better method than paying $15 * 3 each time I want an update? Thanks for the help!
Try http://www.annualcreditreport.com where you can get one free report from each of the three CRAs every year. If the accounts have been closed for a while, you can try disputing them for any of the reasons they provide online, or send them a letter with a dispute (see the site for the specific details). Some might get validated, some might fall off. Each account and CRA is different.
You may want to enroll in Credit Expert or some type of monitoring service if your going to attempt to restore your credit. At Apex Credit Services, LLC, we do the following: 1) Dispute any and all derogatory remarks that are damaging (not a four year old 30 day late) through the credit reporting agencies. We do this by data field thus, if we don't remove it (which we don't remove everything) we typically accrue a violation of the FCRA and/or the FDCPA. 2) We then contact the creditors under the FACTA amendment to the FCRA, ask for verification, and tell them what they did wrong during their verification to the credit reportin agencies. We also contact the debt collectors and debt purchasers; i.e., those such as Anderson Financial Network, Inc., and request validation as well as point out their violations of the FCRA and/or FDCPA. 3) We request a second series of re-investigations through the credit reporting agencies in order to achieve a maximum level of deletions and for those tradelines which remain, violations. 4) We then send our clients to a consumer attorney in their state or the client is satisfied. I would suggest you do the above. Works fairly well.
