My Experience With a Credit Repair Company

A reader e-mailed me a few days ago with question.

He wanted to hire a credit repair agency to get some negative entries removed from his credit report. He wanted to know if I could recommend a specific service.

I actually used a credit repair service 6 years ago to clean up some old debt. It was a toss up between the company I used (whose name eludes me at the moment, but who I also think is not in business anymore) and Lexington Law Firm.

I did my due dilligence, and researched both companies.

Lexington had a TON of complaints from previous customers, so I decided to go with the other company.

Besides that, I had somehow signed up to receive more info from Lexington, and to this day I still get e-mail's from them trying to persuade me to use their service. I've tried unsubscribing countless times to no avail. There's no way I would work with a company like that.

Anyway, this particular company did manage to get 2-3 negative entries removed. And as soon as I thought I was home free those same negative's would re-appear, just as fresh as ever, a couple of months later.

I was paying something like $30 for each deleted item, in addition to a $19.95 monthly fee.

In the end I didn't think it was worth it to pay a monthly fee, and a deleted item fee, only to have the negative entry return like Jason from Friday the 13th.

So I decided to cancel the service.

In the end I had to snail-mail the company a letter stating that I wanted to close my account. What a freaking pain in the butt that is! They took my money online, but couldn't close the account online. That was just a ploy to keep milking their customers, if you ask me.

If you should decide to go with a credit repair service just make sure you ask the following questions:

* What is the monthly/quarterly fee?

* When are those fee's requested?

* What do they do for that fee?

* Are there any per item deletion fee's? What happens if that item re-appears on your credit report?

* How long have they been in business? How long have they been offering the service through the Internet? (You can see how long their site has been in existence by doing a Whois search. Simply type in the URL of the site, and you'll be shown all sorts of background information about it.)

* What type of items do they dispute?

* What is the average turnaround for getting items deleted?

* What happens if 4-6 months pass and there are no deleted items? Is there any sort of refund policy?

* What do you do to cancel the service?

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