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A credit report is a powerful piece of paper. Lenders look at it closely when deciding whether or not to give you a loan. Insurance companies can use it to determine your rates or whether they will cover you at all. Employers can access it and use it as a factor in offering you a job or promotion. With that much significance placed on your credit report, it is absolutely essential that the information it contains paints you in a good light.

Repairing your credit yourself saves you money

According to the Fair Credit Reporting Act, consumers can dispute mistakes in their credit report for free. It can be a little time consuming to pull your report, document the error, type up a letter and send it in, so many people hire credit repair agencies to do the boring work for them. There is no real reason, other than the issue of time, to pour out money for work that you can easily do yourself.

There are no secret tricks to credit repair

Don't be fooled into thinking that you don't have the knowledge to clean up your credit report and that a credit repair agency knows a bunch of angles that have eluded you. Everything you need to know in order to fix errors on your credit report is readily available and there is nothing in the process that is required to be done by a third party or professional agency that specializes in credit repair.

Keep yourself from getting scammed

Don't fall for the ads that claim an agency can erase bad credit from your report. The only thing by law that can be changed on a credit report is inaccurate information. If you have had a bankruptcy, the only thing that will legally remove it from your credit report is time.

Credit repair agencies charge anywhere from $400 to $2000 for their services and the reality is they are not doing anything that you can't do for yourself. For $30 you can obtain a credit report that lists your history with all three credit bureaus. The rest of the investment in cleaning up your credit report is in the value of the time it requires.