Ok, I know you guys are getting a lot of the same questions from us newbies, BUT...I also want to be assured I am doing this in the correct sequence. I have a bunch of credit cards Visa/MC's and a Chevron. I have a few medicals in collections and a super old sears card that has been turned over a zillion times to different CA's. I am about to get a good amount of tax money which I plan to use most of to repair my credit. I will prob. try to make a good payoff deal directly with my Cap. One and HSBC cards and keep one of each, but my other stuff, I would like to get rid of, if possible. This Juniper card I had went from a 350.00 limit that I went over 40 bucks and got to 1262.00. (It has only been about a year and a half) It made a HUGE jump at one point that I am bewildered as to how it got that large. Should I first send one of the validation letters or dispute letters to the CA? Should I contact the credit bureaus also or wait on that? So far, I am dealing with NCO, LRA and tons of others. I get about 8 phone calls per day from one or two of these CA's. They will sometimes even call back to back in a 5 minute period. They call my work and have sent mail to my work. I work in a freakin restaurant. How weird is that to be the only server to receive mail. LOL Anyway, I have gotten all 3 of my free reports. Any advice on how to handle this would help me out greatly! Right now I care less about my score and more about paying off the things I HAVE to pay off and reducing the amount I owe by as much as possible without having to pay more to a counseling service. This is my only chance to make a huge dent in my debt while I have this tax money available, but also to try not to spend it all in case of an emergency. Thank you guys for reading my book...LOL. Like I said...anything you can tell me would be great! And please word it as, "Debt Repair for Dummies". (because I am one when it comes to money issues!) heehee Jen
It may be best to simply dispute everything through the credit reporting agencies to begin with. Whatever remains you may consider paying but, please be advised that simply paying things off doesn't necessarily make your credit worthiness any better. In fact, it can serve to reduce your scores even further on occasion.
Even though they are not mistakes, I should dispute them? How do I go about that? Do I just fill out disputes with different reasons for each and see which ones they delete?
How do you know there aren't mistakes? My bet is that there are within the data fields. You need to identify those are premise any dispute of those. You need to reduce the disputes to writing and send those communications to the credit reporting agencies.
