Equifax Dispute - Remove Bad Credit

To dispute a bad credit item on your Equifax credit report you must send a credit dispute letter. In your letter you must include the disputed item and why it is incorrect.

This letter can be created by you or you can hire a credit repair service to do it on your behalf. If you choose to do it yourself realize you have to dispute the item with each credit bureau.

This means that if you send a letter to Equifax and they remove the mark you will also need to send a letter to Transunion or Experian. There is no communication between the three bureaus regarding disputes.

Common reasons to dispute a bad credit item include; information is wrong, item is out of date, account paid in full and more. The Fair Credit Reporting Act passed by congress gives you the right to dispute any item on your credit report.

In addition this act says that any mark that can not be verified must be removed from your report. This is what the dispute process is based upon.

When your dispute is filled the bureau will conduct an investigation. They will contact the creator of the negative mark and ask them to verify the debt, the amounts and the dates.

If this item is not verified by the creator then the bureaus must remove it from your credit report. Often investigations will result in the removal of an item from your report. This is because many businesses are not willing to spend the resources to verify disputed debts.

However before the bureau will investigate your dispute they must say it is valid. There is no clear cut definition of what a valid dispute is.

Often a sample dispute letter will be answered with a letter from the bureau asking for more information about the dispute. Many credit repair experts claim that this is nothing more than a stall tactic used to avoid the investigation.

This is because it will only cost the bureaus money to investigate disputes. The bureaus customers are businesses and only because of government law is there a dispute process.

I suggest hiring a service if you have considerable damage to your credit. However if you only have minor damage such as one or two negative listings then you can dispute your report yourself. If you do it yourself just be patient and persistent.

In sum you do not have to wait seven years for a bad credit item to be removed from your credit. You can dispute the listing and have it removed immediately.