If you’re looking for ways to improve your credit, perhaps so you can buy a house or car, you may consider hiring a credit repair company to help you. Before you pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for a company to fix your credit, make sure you understand your rights.
You have the right to have errors removed from your credit report for free. When you find errors on your credit report, you can dispute them with the credit bureau. You don’t have to pay a fee to dispute these errors yourself. If the credit bureau doesn’t remove the credit report error, you can contact the company who provided the information to sort out the error. However, if you use a credit repair company to do your disputes, you’ll have to whatever fee the credit repair service charges.
You can repair your own credit. You don’t have to use a credit repair company to fix your credit. Everything a credit repair company can do, you can do on your own for less money. In fact, it may be smarter to use the money that you would’ve paid to a credit repair company to pay off some of your debts and boost your credit score that way.
You don’t have to pay a credit repair company until they’ve performed the services. Credit repair companies aren’t legally allowed to charge you until after they’ve already provided the services for you. If you choose hire a credit repair company, make sure they’re not violating this right.
You can cancel your contract within three days. If you end up with buyer’s remorse, the credit repair company has to give you the right to cancel your contract within three business days. They’re required to give you a refund for any services that haven’t been performed. Make sure you cancel the contract in writing to make your cancellation completely effective.
These rights after covered under the Fair Credit Reporting Act and the Credit Repair Organizations Act. Both of these are Federal laws. If you believe your rights under these laws have been violated you can file a complaint with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau at consumerfinance.gov/complaint.