Wednesday, November 26, 2008

How to Restore Credit After Bankruptcy

By Derrick A. Clayton

After bankruptcy there are steps you can follow to help repair your credit back to its original state. This will not happen immediately, but over time you will see results. Make sure to follow the right steps to remove the negative records left by the bankruptcy and get you back on the right path.

What can you do about a bankruptcy on your credit report?

Any credit accounts that were eliminated during the bankruptcy will be listed as either a "Charge-off" or "BK Liq Reo" on your credit report. The actual bankruptcy will show up as a public record either as a Chapter 7 or Chapter 13.

The only way to eradicate the bankruptcy itself from your credit report is to dispute it directly with the credit bureaus. You can usually find some error in the reporting of the bankruptcy, since the information is entered by a human being.

Look closely on your credit report for any mistake the data clerk made when adding up all of the bankruptcy accounts. They often round the number to the next dollar amount and this is technically not the actual number. Therefore, you could challenge this and in a lot of cases the bankruptcy will be eliminated.

Believe it or not, bankruptcies can often be easier deleted than most other negative items on your credit report. Bankruptcy files have voluminous pages that need to be translated into an record on your report. So it is very likely that some sort of transcription error could be made by the person transferring the information to your report.

Working with regional courts is quite different from working with typical credit grantors. Getting the courts to cooperate will make it difficult for the bureau to respond to your dispute letter within the allotted time, and the court's disorganization can work to your advantage.

When sending your demand for correction, make sure that it is addressed to the three major credit bureaus, not to the local government office that maintains the bankruptcy file. The major credit bureaus must correct or verify any errors within a certain amount of time (usually 30 days) or remove them from your credit record. It is not difficult to find some error in all the bankruptcy papers, so use this to your benefit.

A bankruptcy is not a death sentence for your credit file, and often it is much easier to erase a bankruptcy record then a number of small miscellaneous entries on your credit report. Examine the bankruptcy records thoroughly, find a mistake, then file a demand to have it removed from your report, so that you can start building your credit again. - 15224

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