Credit Reports for Credit Repair
A Hammer is a Better Choice
The right tool makes the job easier. I suppose you could build a house without a hammer. A rock could do the job. But why make life hard? A hammer is a much better choice. Likewise, you want to start the credit repair process with the right credit report. It can make a really big difference. No kidding.
The Right Report
You can get credit reports in a dozen different formats. It makes sense to get one that presents your credit information in a user friendly way; a way that helps your credit repair effort rather than hinders it. As it happens, you get what you pay for.
The Problem with Free Reports
You can get your credit reports one time per year at AnnualCreditReport.Com, a site mandated by the government that serves as a hub for the three major credit bureaus. These free reports come in three different formats, and are virtually guaranteed to confuse. Even if you read credit reports for a living (that would be us) these free reports are no fun.
The Joy of Tri-Merged Reports
For a small fee, you can purchase a wonderful tri-merged report that incorporates the data from all three bureaus into a single user-friendly format. This allows to you (or us, thank you) to easily find the issues that should be disputed on each bureau simultaneously, without losing any of the credit-repair-critical information like bureau-specific identifiers; did you know that the individual bureaus often use different account numbers for the same accounts?
Make the Investment
In almost all cases, credit repair has a big monetary value. Credit score improvement may translate into major savings. If you are starting credit repair you should invest the fifteen or twenty dollars for a report that will facilitate the work. It is well worth it.
Back to the Bureaus
Where should you get these great user friendly reports? In spite of the fact that the free reports offered by the three bureaus are poor, they all offer excellent tri-merged reports at their websites, for a fee. Like I said, you get what you pay for. When you sign up for our program we will give you a link to the report that we prefer, but each bureau does a good job.
No Fuss
When you go looking, you may find that you need to sign up for a monthly monitoring service in order to get the tri-merged report. This is not a terrible thing. You may benefit from the ability to monitor your credit, but regardless, as all of these monitoring memberships allow you to cancel at anytime, you can get your report and say goodbye whenever you want, without fuss.
7 Responses
I was totally tortured by annualcreditreport.com when I tried to get my free reports. Two of them blocked me because I didn’t remember a car payment I had 10 years ago. Do you recommend a particular tri-merged report to buy?
AnnualCreditReport.com is the worst. It took me hours to get two reports and i had to call up for my Transunion. They said they would send it in the mail and i still do not have it. the whole deal was horrible. The credit bureaus have to give you the reports for free but i’m sure that they made it really hard to discourage people from doing it. Grrrr.
Hi Raj, We hear this everyday. As mentioned, a tri-merged report is easier to get and to easier read. It will cost a few dollars, but in the big picture it is well worth it.
I keep hearing that Experian is the hardest bureau to work with. Is that true?
Hi Sal, We find that the bureaus are roughly equal in their receptivity to processing disputes promptly and to our satisfaction. Occasionally we notice that a bureau will go through a period when they seem to send more frivolous letters than normal, but these periods are short lived. A couple of years ago Experian went through a fairly prolonged period when they were rejecting a significant percentage of disputes. This may be where they got their reputation! At the moment the three bureaus all seem to be quite cooperative.
This is a nice and informative piece about credit reports. You didn’t actually mention which reports to get or where to get them. What do you think about the reports from MYFICO.COM?
Hi Torres, Thanks for the kind words! We like the reports from TrueCredit the best. MyCreditKeeper and Equifax also do a nice job. MyFICO is the only website that you can get FICO scores for both TransUnion and Equifax (Experian has opted out of letting consumers purchase their FICO scores directly). Unfortunately, tri-merged reports from MyFICO have a terrible shortcoming as far as credit repair goes – they do not show any account numbers. Instead they censor the numbers with XXXXs. This is a deal breaker as far as we are concerned as a lack of accounts numbers can make it problematic to identify accounts with the precision that we prefer. So, we cannot recommend their reports. You may want to read this: Experian Has Left the Building