According to the FTC website "No one can legally remove accurate and timely negative information from a credit report. The law allows you to ask for an investigation of information in your file that you dispute as inaccurate or incomplete."

This is a message that seems very simple. In fact, many critics of credit repair and credit repair law firms such as Lexington Law will try to use this message to imply that the only recourse for people with a bad credit score is to wait for their credit to improve on its own. When you take time to research the laws surrounding credit reporting and your rights to dispute the negative information in your credit reports, however, you will find that the FTC quote above is much less black and white than critics of credit repair would have you believe.

This mostly has to do with the idea of inaccurate vs. accurate when it comes to the information included in your credit reports. When we typically think of these terms, we think of them according to how they are defined in a dictionary. In the credit reporting world, however, these two words mean something different. While they are not wholly redefined, the definitions of these two words as they are used in the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) are modified when they are applied to the credit reporting system.

When trying to get an idea of what is accurate when talking about your credit reports, it is helpful to identify those things that are not accurate.

To start with, there are items that are patently inaccurate or untimely. These are listings on your credit reports that belong to someone else, have been added more than once, are the result of identity theft, have been listed longer than 7 years, etc. Because of how the credit reporting system works, it is surprisingly common for these types of items to end up on your credit reports. In fact, studies show that a majority of credit reports contain these types of errors.

For many people, this is the only type of negative item they believe can be disputed and removed from a credit report. The truth is there are a number of other classifications of negative items on your credit reports that you have the right to dispute.

Along with disputing negative items that are patently inaccurate or untimely, you also have the right to dispute any item you feel is misleading, incomplete, ambiguous, unverifiable, biased or unclear.

The financial fallout from a divorce is a common way for these less obvious types of inaccurate credit listings to appear on your credit reports. Often times in a divorce, financial responsibilities are divvied up between the two spouses. One spouse may receive the house while the other receives a car and the credit cards. Each spouse is then responsible for the ongoing payments of the items they were assigned. The problem is that creditors do not have to abide by the terms of the divorce court. If one person stops payment on the mortgage, for example, because both names are on the paperwork, the lender will seek to collect payment from both people and if they do not receive this payment, they may report the delinquencies on both people's credit reports. So, even though only one spouse is living in the house and is responsible for making payments, the other can still have their credit score hammered by the lender.

In a case like this, the innocent spouse can clearly make the case that the delinquencies listed on their credit reports are misleading because they make their credit look bad even though they have done nothing wrong.

There are few topics as polarizing as credit repair. Depending on who you talk to, credit repair is usually thought of as impossible, illegal, something you can only do yourself, or something you need professional help to perform. Rarely do you find someone with a perspective on credit repair that is not at the far end of one of these extremes.

The fascinating thing is that in most cases, whatever people believe to be true will be true for them.

The poster on the Yahoo! Answers forum who states that "there is NO SUCH thing as Credit Repair....it's a scam...." will never realize any benefits from repairing their own credit. By believing that credit repair is impossible, they are fulfilling their own prophecy by ignoring their rights to dispute their own credit. By not believing it can be done, they are proving their own point. This person, and every other person who ignores the possibility of credit repair, will fall into the category of people whose credit scores will only improve through the passage of time.

The same is true of people who believe that credit repair companies do not work. Another poster on Yahoo! Answers stated that

"There is no such thing as repairing your credit through someone else. If they can, they are doing this via an illegal way and be extremely careful, as it can end YOU up in jail and fined.
The ONLY way to repair credit is to do it yourself.
Pay your bills on time ;o)"

Along with being misinformed about how the credit repair process works, this person is letting their flawed knowledge keep them from so much as investigating the possibility that a credit repair company may be able to help them out. Once again, in believing that it is impossible for a credit repair company to provide any value, this person has assured that they will never receive any value from a credit repair organization.

It is truly astounding how many people out there believe that credit repair cannot work and credit repair companies are nothing but scams. It is also unfortunate that it is these voices that seem to be the loudest because not only are they making credit repair an impossibility for themselves, but they are convincing so many other people to not even attempt to repair their own credit.

What is equally astounding is how these people can be so passionate about outing credit repair as a pipe dream and a scam when there are so many other people out there who are living proof that credit repair does in fact work. These are the people who have allowed for the possibility that their credit could be repaired and realized the truth about their credit reports.

It is hard to believe that anyone could completely dismiss the idea of credit repair when there are stories like this:

"I signed up for [credit repair firm] a couple of years ago. They basically write a couple of letters a month on your behalf to either businesses or credit reporting companies asking for verification of debt, that kind of thing, or if you instruct them, actually challenging the debt. After a few rounds of this, negative credit items start to fall off your report. You can totally do this yourself, but it's been worth the cost to me (something like $40/month) since I am too lazy to regularly write this kind of letter. I also like how when the credit bureaus do bother to write back, they're always pretty whiny and pissy about it.

Some people seem to think this is some kind of scam (like, paralegals write the letters on your behalf instead of attorneys, and some people don't seem to understand that when you give an attorney "power of attorney," they can write letters as you), but I think it's a fair price for something I was too lazy to do myself. Ultimately, they pretty much got rid of all the negative items on my report except for the ones that were at least semi-legitimate. (I'm not going to pay a parking ticket I got five years ago in a state I'm not going back to.) The ones they did get rid of were things like AOL continuing to charge a credit card after a) I had cancelled the AOL account, and b) I had cancelled the credit card! It just wasn't worth my time to chase this down with AOL or the credit card company.

It's annoying that I'm responsible for fixing something that this bogus industry screws up in the first place, but other than that, I'm a happy "credit repair" customer."

People who believe that credit repair is impossible will never see any benefit from it. People who believe that credit repair can only be done by themselves will only see the benefits of their personal efforts. People who believe that credit repair companies do not work will never invite the opportunity to have a credit repair company work for them.

Ultimately, when it comes to credit repair, we all create our own truths. All anybody can ask of you is to perform your own research instead of letting others choose your truths for you.