Want to Fix Credit and Get Free Credit Repair Advice?

How much does bad credit cost me?

As you consider retaining Lexington Law you would do well to look at the price you are already paying for bad credit. Below are just a few examples of the cost of bad credit.

Credit Cards
Most if not all prime credit cards are entirely out of reach to consumers with bad credit. And the few credit cards that are available to them (known as "sub-prime" cards) typically require high setup fees or recurring monthly fees, offer very low credit lines, often require cash deposits, and in most cases do not even report your positive credit activity to the credit bureaus.

Automobile Financing
If you are making payments on a car, you are probably paying between $1,500 and $5,000 more just for having bad credit. This added interest shows up every month in a higher payment. Take a look.

$20,000 car paid over 5 years:
CREDIT STATUS	RATE	PAYMENT	COST OF BAD CREDIT
Perfect Mildly Damaged Damaged	6.768% 9.738% 14.7295%	$394 $422 $473	$0.00 $1,680 $4,740

Home Mortgage
Bad credit in auto financing can really hurt, but it is nothing compared to the cost of bad credit when a home is involved. A typical home can cost between $50,000 and $130,000 more in interest if you are buying the home with bad credit.

$100,000 home paid over 30 years:
CREDIT STATUS	RATE	PAYMENT	COST OF BAD CREDIT
Perfect Mildly Damaged Damaged	6.4065% 7.581% 12.5015%	$626 $705 $1,067	$0.00 $10,440 $158,760

Can questionable, bad credit be deleted or corrected?

The simple fact is that questionable credit listings are either deleted or corrected by the thousands each and every day through the efforts of individual consumers and organizations like Lexington Law. The proof is very compelling: The efforts of Lexington Law Firm have successfully assisted clients in obtaining deletion and correction of many hundreds of thousands of questionable credit listings being deleted (click here to see it with your own eyes).

It's not necessarily easy or foolproof, and Lexington cannot guarantee success, but the right to improve your credit by challenging questionable items is yours.

Are items such as bankruptcies and foreclosures impossible to remove or correct?

To see how many questionable bankruptcies we removed or corrected during the last quarter please refer to our stats.*

There is not one type of questionable listing that cannot be removed from a credit report if it is inaccurate, untimely, misleading, biased, incomplete or unverifiable (in our work, we refer to such items as "questionable"). While negative items such as bankruptcies or unpaid debts are more difficult to remove from the credit report, this has more to do with the operational systems of the credit bureaus than with the severity of the bad credit item. For example, judgments and tax liens are severely negative listings yet, in Lexington's experience, clients have had more success getting them removed than other types of listings. Whether a questionable item can be corrected or removed has little to do with its severity alone.

Do negative items have to remain listed for 7 years?

When you speak with certain creditors, their typically under-educated staff may tell you the law demands that negative listings appear on your credit report for seven to ten years.

The truth is that the credit grantor or the credit bureau can choose to delete the negative credit listing at any time, especially when you give them a reason to do so. The 7 year term is merely a time limit for reporting negative credit. Some items, like bankruptcies, may stay on a report longer than 7 years.

Does paying off past-due accounts neutralize their negative status?

No. Paid, but once-delinquent, debts still show up as severe negatives. It's important to note that credit reports don't just show your current credit situation, but they also show what your credit situation has been in the past. Therefore, past delinquency, collection activity or a charged off listing does a great deal of damage to the credit score even if it was paid off. This is one of the great ironies of the credit reporting system; paying your past-due debts does little to immediately increase your credit score and may actually make the score worse.

Are you really a law firm?

Lexington Law is a group of associated independent consumer advocacy law firms focusing on credit-related issues. Each firm is owned and supervised by its respective directing attorney. Each one is a state-of-the-art law firm offering exceptional customer service.

You may wonder how you can get the services of a law firm for such a low monthly rate. To provide phenomenal service at an extremely affordable price, work is completed by a team of attorneys, paralegals and legal assistants using advanced computer and web systems. And yet, when you retain a Lexington Law firm you complete a legal retainer agreement which affords you all the protections and assurances of an attorney/client relationship.

Will deleted items just reappear on the credit report?

On occasion, a negative listing that was recently deleted may eventually be verified by the creditor. The Fair Credit Reporting Act requires that the credit bureau inform you before the re-report a previously deleted listing. The FCRA also makes it more difficult for credit bureaus to re-report listings. Because of these factors, it is fairly rare for listings to come back on once they've been deleted.

If a questionable credit item is verified at a later point in time, Lexington will help you challenge the listing again if there are legitimate grounds to do so.

What does it mean to fix bad credit?

Studies show that the majority of credit reports contain errors. Whether through clerical errors, mistaken identities, improper accounting, or simple misunderstandings, there are an estimated 200+ million Americans with errors on their credit reports. And in many cases, these errors are significant. As many as 25% of all credit reports contain errors serious enough to cause someone to be denied on a credit application.

So when talking about fixing bad credit, there is more to it than just trying to increase a credit score. It is about repairing the errors and omissions in your credit reports. Responsibly managing your credit will help you start working towards a better credit score, but truly fixing bad credit requires that you also focus on the source of the problem.