Chapter Thirteen 

Do-it-yourselfers, Deceivers,
Discounters and Damage-collectors

Despite the endless blather being churned out by consumer advocate "experts" that "only time can cure bad credit," there's a small (but growing) corps of people who offer to expedite the credit correction and credit improvement process. But, they're a mixed bag of competent professionals and loudmouth cranks. If you're going to seek credit repair assistance, you'd better learn the difference, because these guys can either be a godsend or they can make your credit situation even worse.

Do-it-yourselfers
In the age of the internet, information is cheap (but you often get what you pay for). The world wide web is chock full of people who have styled themselves as experts in the art of beating the system. Truth is, they have many great ideas and have forged the way to empowering people to make a hobby of their personal credit score and credit history. It is encouraging to see that regular people can take control of their situation and manipulate the credit institutions to go to work for them, instead of the other way around. There are a couple of drawbacks to following the ranks of self-appointed consumer information hobbyists. First, not all great consumer strategies are created equal. Many of these plans don't work or are greatly oversimplified. Second, even if the quality of the information is top-rate, it may be very tough to implement. Repairing your own credit, for example, is often amazingly time-consuming.

Deceivers
Unfortunately, "credit repair" has become a dirty word in some circles. It's with great regret that we must admit that the bad rap has been, to some degree, deserved. In the early nineties, credit repair was a hot bed of fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants, here-today-gone-tomorrow business. Many credit repair operations launched willy-nilly into offering quick fixes to credit problems. Some shouted from the rooftops that any type of negative credit, either accurate or inaccurate, could be removed with the snap of their fingers. Others claimed to have super-secret computer disks that would penetrate the credit bureau databases and mysteriously clear off bad credit listings. Still others offered to forge a new identity for any consumer who had destroyed their reputation. These dishonest fraudsters drew the ire of credit bureaus and regulatory agencies and kicked off an era of bad blood between consumer advocates and every credit correction enterprise that could even loosely be deemed a "credit repair" operation.

Credit Revolution: Path of the Smart Consumer
© 2007 John C. Heath, Esq., Dr. Randy Padawer, Jayson R. Orvis. All Rights Reserved.
Published by Far Cliffs Multimedia, LLC