Tuesday, July 28, 2009

How to Save Time and Money When Hiring a Credit Repair Attorney


By Ben Douglas

Correcting credit errors is a miserable process. Once you finally end the procrastination about fixing your credit, you have to make a decision. You can take one of two different credit repair paths.

First, you can do it yourself. Second, you can hire a credit attorney. For all you "do-it-yourselfers" it is mighty tempting to try it on your own. After all, it is much cheaper, right?

Perhaps not. If you are trying to avoid hiring a credit attorney you are probably not considering the real expense, both in resources and time, of attempting to repair your credit yourself. First of all, to be effective youll need to research and understand your legal rights. There are state and federal laws which apply, notably the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA).

If you are not the kind of person who likes to do legal research in your free time, or don't have patience for translating wordy statutes and confusing case precedent, then this might not be for you. But if you are determined enough to plow through the stacks of law books, then you should expect to spend at least a a few Saturday afternoons researching applicable credit laws.

Assuming you make it through the case law and statutes with your sanity intact, then you have to move onto the more involved portion. The next step is to write a coherent and compelling dispute letter. You will need to cite the applicable case law and disputed items.

Specifically, a good credit bureau dispute letter must contain certain elements, and must be silent as to other elements. Your dispute letter will be ignored if not drafted properly. If you write the letter incorrectly, the bureaus will probably throw your dispute in the garbage and you have to start all over.

Next, you need to travel to the nearest post office and stand in line so that your letters are all certified. This is time consuming and quite costly. If you send three letters for each round of disputes, you are looking at paying about ten dollars per dispute.

Mailing dispute letters via certified mail takes a lot of time. Unless you are unemployed, this is probably not worth your time. Surely you consider your time valuable.

Disputing your credit without the help of an attorney takes a great deal of organization. Assuming you are trying to remove more than a single bad credit item, you will have to stay on top of the progress of your case. To make sure the bureaus or creditors did not ignore your dispute, you will need to create a spreadsheet to track the results of each dispute and negotiation.

Does this sound like fun? Do it yourself credit repair is overwhelming and intimidating especially if you are not highly motivated to learn the federal credit laws. So, unless you are dedicated to becoming an expert in the federal statutes, the issue is not can you afford to hire a credit repair attorney, but rather can you afford NOT to seek help from an affordable qualified attorney.

About the Author:


You like it? Share it!


0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home