Erasing Bad Credit is Possible – Sort Of

There are so many reasons you’d want to erase bad credit – some of them are financial (because you need decent credit to borrow money for important things like houses, vehicles, and education), and some of them are personal (because let’s face it…having terrible credit is embarrassing – it makes you feel like a second class citizen). Advertisers know how desperately people want to be able to repair their credit, and saying “you can absolutely make all your credit blunders disappear!” has a lot of appeal in the marketplace. There’s only one problem: it’s just not true.

The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) has come right out and said that it’s actually not possible to get bad credit erased completely. Your best hope is to go through the normal process of cleaning up and repairing your damaged credit. Basically, there’s no quick fix, no matter what the advertisers would have you believe.

You might read that and say “But I thought I could dispute incorrect information on my credit report and get it removed?” Yes, you definitely can. But just the process of disputing a blemish on your credit history won’t make it disappear. The only way to get something completely erased from your credit history is to dispute it, which leads to an investigation, which if successful gets the negative item removed by the various reporting agencies. It’s a relatively long process and requires plenty of follow through and follow up on your part. There is no guaranteed the credit bureaus will do this though. Which takes us back to the advertisers and their promises.

You should be fully aware that no matter what a credit repair company tells you, they can’t force or require the credit tracking agencies to remove anything from your credit report at all. Of course they’re going to make such claims…how else would they get you to pay their fees if you didn’t believe you were guaranteed to get a great result?

The fact is that erasing a bad credit score is really difficult, but it doesn’t have to be expensive to go through the credit-repair process. If you contact the FTC and ask them about non-profit credit clean-up organizations they’ll direct you to those with a proven track record of getting people’s credit in the best possible shape without having to pay really high fees.

Do your homework, and resist the urge to look for a quick fix. The more you look for a quick fix the more likely you are to fall prey to hyped up advertising that will cost you way too much money and not even deliver the improved credit score you need and want.