Whatever your background or record, you can take some simple and quick steps to begin your own credit repair. It costs nothing and you can begin right away – but the results can be tremendous!

To start, you’ll need to get a copy of your credit reports and actually go through them. There are three separate credit reporting bureaus and each one will have a slightly different report.

The law now provides consumers the right to one free credit report from each of the bureaus, Experian, TransUnion, and Equfax. You are entitled to one from each company every year.

There is a website set up by the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) specifically for this purpose: annualcreditreport.com. Be leery of any other sites claiming free credit reports – there will be strings & fees attached.

You’ll start your credit repair efforts as soon as you get your reports. To begin with, you want to read each report line by line.

Along with the report, you will get a “dispute” form – or an address where you can get it. This is where your initial credit repair efforts will focus.

Make a note of each and every entry that is either incorrect, outdated, or inaccurate. For each of these, you will be filing a dispute. You will want to list why the entry should be removed, such as a debt that has already been paid but hasn’t yet been removed.

By law, the credit reporting agencies have 30 days to verify the information being disputed. If they cannot verify it, or don’t do so within the allotted 30 days, those entries must be removed from your credit report.

With just this simple step, some of these negative entries will be removed from your credit report. They will no longer contribute to a low credit score, and your score will immediately go up – sometimes by hundreds of points!