How to Contest Derogatory Items Affecting a FICO Score

Keeping your FICO score high is important to many parts of your life. Not only is it important for getting credit or buying a home, some employers may even check your credit score. Therefore, when you see something on your credit report that is negatively affecting your credit score, you want to get it off. The tricky part is that you cannot dispute this information through FICO, even if you purchased your credit report from their website. You must dispute this information with the individual credit bureaus who are reporting it.

Instructions

1

Locate the negative items on your credit report that could be negatively affecting your FICO score. These are things like late payments, collections and public records.

2

Write a dispute letter. You can hire a lawyer who is educated on the Fair Credit Reporting Act to write this for you, or you can download a template from the Internet (see resources) and customize it to meet your situation. List all of the items that you want to dispute, and you may even want to include a copy of your credit report and highlight the items on there, so that there is no misunderstanding.

3

Find the address for each credit bureau (see resources) that you need to send the letter to. You only need to send it to the bureaus that are listing the derogatory items on your credit report. If it is not on your credit report, it does not affect your FICO score.

4

Send your letters off. You may want to purchase a service, like certified mail with return receipt, which confirms that the credit bureaus received your dispute. By law, they must resolve your dispute within 30 to 45 days of receipt, so it may be helpful to know exactly when they received it.

5

Wait for contact from the credit bureaus. If you don't receive anything within 30 to 45 days, then you can buy your report again to see if anything has changed. If the item was verified, it will remain on your report; if it could not be verified, it should be removed from your report.