A credit repair letter is how you challenge negative items on your credit report. This letter is also commonly called a dispute letter.

This letter informs the credit bureaus that a mark is incorrect. The credit bureaus upon receipt of your letter will begin an investigation. A letter must be sent to each credit bureau that shows the disputed mark on your credit report.

In your letter you must include the disputed item, the reason for the dispute, your name and address. Common reasons for a dispute are; account is paid in full, not your account, information wrong, item out of date and more.

The Fair Credit Reporting Act was passed in response to complaints from people having inaccurate negative marks on their credit report. Up until this law was passed people had no way of challenging a negative mark on their credit report.

The difficult part of disputing a mark is getting the credit bureaus to deem your dispute letter valid. The way it works is the credit bureau will spend money that would otherwise be profit investigating disputes.

Thus credit bureaus use stall tactics and avoid investigations when possible. Often a response to a dispute letter is to request more information, regardless of the need for it. This is an attempt to frustrate you into giving up on the dispute process.

You should also be aware that the 100 word statement serves no benefit to you. This is a statement that you can place on your credit report next to a negative mark.

In the past this was used to explain what happened. However today if you fill in this statement you are only admitting guilt to the bureaus.

This will cause you to have literally no chance of ever removing this negative item from your credit report. The bureaus will deem any future letter challenging the accuracy or validity as erroneous, resulting in the mark staying on your report.

Negative listings can be removed; you just need to be persistent and patient. I would suggest looking into a credit repair service if you have multiple negative listings on your credit report.