While I no longer offer credit counseling as a direct service, we’ve partnered with some great companies that can help you with a wide variety of credit issues.
The fundamentals of building credit and getting into a good score range are:
- Dealing with negatives – payoff, settle, dispute, or wait until they fall off
- Building on the positives
- Maintain a good “credit mix”
- Disputing inaccurate, outdated, or unverifiable info
- Making sure credit utilization ratios are below 10-30%
There are additional things to look out for, but these are the crucial ones.
What About Credit Repair?
Credit Repair is the process of disputing inaccurate, outdated, or unverifiable listings in order to get them removed or altered on your credit file. Much like debt relief, it’s an industry that’s had it’s fair share of problems and bad actors.
However, when it is done correctly, it can be very effective. After careful research and taking over a year to get to know the company and their executives, I’ve partnered with a credit repair company for the first time: Credit Repair Resources, out of Cleveland, Ohio.
Credit Repair Resources
CRR is at the top of their field in terms of expertise, client experience, ethics, compliance – and most importantly, results. I learned about them from a settlement client of mine – they were able to get all of his negative history deleted from a Navient account that had been late and in default before we settled it. This helped him get a mortgage and definitely jump started the post-settlement credit rebuilding process.
It has not been easy to find a reputable credit restoration company, and I held off on partnering with any of them – until I met Chad Kusner, the owner of Credit Repair Resources.
Click here for a FREE evaluation through Credit Repair Resources.
What About Credit Monitoring?
Credit monitoring can be super helpful during the credit building (or rebuilding) journey. While the free apps like Credit Karma can be a good baseline, they can sometimes interpret information inaccurately from the credit bureaus, and don’t update in real time.
There are some good paid services for credit monitoring that offer much more. After carefully vetting many of them, I decided to partner with IdentityIQ.
IdentityIQ
IdentityIQ has several different services in the $27-$30 per month range. One of their biggest benefits is real time, instant credit reporting. This can be particularly helpful while going through a strategic default for settlement, and is something I recommend for my settlement clients.
Their other benefits include:
- Identity theft protection and insurance (included in the normal credit monitoring service)
- Unlimited access to credit reports, refreshed every 30 days
- Real time credit scores from all three bureaus
- Fraud alert assistance
- ScoreCaster IQ credit building tool
- ChexSystem checking account reporting
- Darkweb monitoring
Click here to sign up for Identity IQ (IDIQ) Credit Monitoring
Disclaimer: Andrew Weber C.C.C. and MyCreditCounselor do not provide any credit related services directly, including credit counseling or credit repair. We receive a small referral fee for any signups through the referral links above.
