How To Write A Letter Requesting A Free Credit Report
How Do I Write a Credit Report Dispute Letter? If you’ve reviewed your credit report, spoken with each furnisher and still believe that an item on your report is inaccurate, here’s what to do, according to John Heath, a consumer attorney with Lexington Law, a Credit.com partner. While a credit dispute letter doesn’t have to be formatted in MLA or APA style like your high school English essays once were, it still needs to be professional and not sound like it was written by a robot. Write the letter as you would to a work colleague or a family member compared to how you might write a text message.
Summary
How To Write A Letter Requesting A Free Credit Report Annual
You’ve spent months trying to scrub errors off your credit reports to no avail. Before you give up completely, try these surefire steps.
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Don’t give up. There are ways you can beat the frustration-causing standard credit report dispute process, say experts.
“The Fair Credit Reporting Act requires that the credit reporting agencies, such as Experian and Equifax and TransUnion, conduct a reasonable investigation whenever a consumer disputes information on their credit report,” says Chi Chi Wu, a staff lawyer at the National Consumer Law Center in Boston.
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The problem is, they rarely do, she says. Instead, credit reporting agencies often rely on the lenders, debt collectors and other data providers that furnished the misinformation to investigate a dispute. If the furnisher of the information mistakenly verifies the errors as correct, then those inaccurate marks will remain stuck in your credit file, no matter how many times you dispute them.
“Because the bureaus spend so little time on investigating errors and usually take the word of the furnisher over the consumer, consumers often need to dispute multiple times, spend countless hours trying to fix mistakes and eventually often have to get legal counsel to get the problems fixed,” says DeVonna Joy, an attorney at the Consumer Justice Law Center in Big Bend, Wisconsin.
But before you threaten legal action, here are 10 steps you can take to make sure you submit a dispute that has the best possible chance of getting an error erased.
10 tips to get errors off your credit reports
- Request a fresh report directly from the credit bureaus.
- Pore over the report for errors large and small.
- Mark up the credit report, highlighting the mistakes.
- Write or type your dispute letter yourself. Don’t dispute the error online.
- Separate disputes into multiple letters.
- Keep it simple.
- Include evidence.
- Mail your dispute to the credit bureaus – and to the data furnisher.
- Stay organized.
- Don’t accept no for an answer.
1. Request a fresh report directly from the credit bureaus.
Before you do anything else, order a fresh report from the credit reporting agency or agencies reporting the inaccurate information. You’ll need this report to send in your next dispute and to keep on hand in case you later need to sue.
Order your report directly from the bureaus, not from a third-party reseller, and avoid relying on a report you got from a lender.
“If you get a report from a lender or another business, it may be a merged report,” says Rod Griffin, director of education at the credit reporting agency Experian. Ordering your report from the credit bureau “ensures that we are looking at exactly the same information that you are,” says Griffin.
Ordering your most recent report also helps to make sure that the information you’re disputing is up to date, he says. “If you’re looking at a credit report that’s several months old and asking about it, we may be looking at a completely different account. It’s been updated or changed or something’s happened,” says Griffin.
Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, you are entitled to a free copy of each of your reports at least once every 12 months. You may also get a free report if you’ve been turned down for credit within the last 60 days. You can order a fresh report online at AnnualCreditReport.com, by telephone at 877-322-8228 or by mail.
If you’ve already used up your free report for the year or have a report that’s several months old, go ahead and pay to get a new one, say experts. You can expect to pay up to $15.95, depending on the credit bureau and the state where you live. Some states, such as Colorado, California, Georgia and Maine, allow you to get an additional report for free or at a reduced price.
2. Pore over the report for errors large and small.
When you last checked your report and saw there was an error, you may have only noticed major errors, such as a court judgment that doesn’t belong to you or a debt that you’re sure you repaid. However, look closely for other, smaller mistakes on your report, such as incorrect addresses or a slight misspelling of your name, say experts.
“Those kinds of things can be indicative of mixed files or identity theft,” says Joy.
Small mistakes in your identifying information could also cause bad information to get into the reports that lenders pull, which may include more information than what you see on your personal report, says Austin, Texas, consumer lawyer Amy Kleinpeter. “When a consumer asks for a credit report, [the credit bureaus] pull the information from an algorithm,” she says, and the matching requirements are fairly stringent.
“But when the car dealer or the lender goes [and asks for a report], they use different algorithms that are wider and pull more information,” says Kleinpeter.
As soon as you get your latest report, Joy recommends that you carefully scan it for variations of your name that you don’t normally use, unfamiliar addresses, incorrect Social Security numbers or a wrong date of birth.
Also look at the section of your report that lists who has pulled your credit information, she says. If you see a company that you don’t recognize or that you did not apply for credit from, ask the credit bureau why it gave them your information. It could be another sign that our file has been mixed up with someone else’s credit.
3. Mark up the credit report, highlighting the mistakes.
“Photocopy the front page and photocopy the page with an error,” says Kleinpeter. Then circle or highlight any error that you see, even if the error seems minor.
If there are multiple errors on your report, put a number next to each error, Kleinpeter adds. That will help you refer to the errors when you write your dispute.
Once you’ve marked up the report, make multiple copies. You’ll need them for your files, as well for your disputes.
4. Write or type your dispute letter yourself. Don’t dispute the error online.
Sending in a dispute online may be quick. However, consumer lawyers say it’s one of the biggest mistakes you can make.
Many online dispute forms contain arbitration clauses, which can undercut your consumer rights. “The credit bureaus bury waiver clauses in the click agreement,” says Cary Flitter. “By clicking, ‘I accept,” you’re giving up the right to sue them if they do something wrong.”
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