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Are you a Georgia resident who is drowning in debt? Is your credit score sinking lower and lower every week? If so, it is time to take back control of your finances and your life. There are a few different ways that you can go about fixing your credit. One of the most efficient methods is working with a credit repair company that can help you to consolidate your debt, get rid of late fees and overdue payments, and also work on rebuilding your credit score. As a Georgia resident you deserve to get everything life has to offer, so why let bad credit hold you down when a credit repair company may be able to help?
Georgia is one of the most affordable states in the US. It tends to be among the states with the lowest cost of living in the US. Despite this low cost of living, Georgia has higher credit card debt on average than most other states. The average in Georgia is $5,493, around $300 above the national average of $5,193.
Unfortunately, the average credit scores in Georgia are below the national average. While the national average in the US is 714, Georgia is at a below-average credit score of 693. This is on the lower end of the scale for a good credit score, but there’s still room for improvement if your credit score is close to the average in Georgia. Credit repair is one of the ways to try improving your score, but only if you have inaccurate or false entries on your credit report.
State laws in Georgia do impact how credit repair organizations can operate. They’re more restrictive than many other states, nearly outlawing the process completely. The main law dealing with credit repair is O.C.G.A. 16-9-59. Under this law, credit repair is not legal unless a company is assisting you in disputing a transaction that’s legitimately inaccurate. They cannot accept payment upfront for this service, and can only charge you after the completion of the service.
Federal law also applies to credit repair in Georgia. The Credit Repair Organizations Act (CROA) details how credit repair companies can operate, including how they can charge for services, how they can advertise their service to avoid misrepresentation, and how they should word contracts. All contracts are required to be written, with payment only allowed after the service is done, not upfront.
No, you don’t need a lawyer for credit repair in Georgia. This is a common misconception about credit repair. There’s no official qualification needed to go through the process. You can even do it yourself, but it’s better to work with a reputable credit repair company instead, whether they’re lawyers or not. This is the best way to make sure you get the process done right the first time, so your credit report can be fixed up as quickly as possible.
In Georgia, you can go through the credit repair process by following this 3-step process:
Every year, you’re legally allowed to get a free credit report. There are 3 major credit bureaus in the US that record entries for your credit report, so you need to request a free report from each one. These reports can be requested online or by the mail, allowing you to access your reports in a way that’s convenient for you.
Although credit reports are the basis for your credit score, they can sometimes contain incorrect entries. These are entries that either have incorrect information recorded in them or shouldn’t be on your credit report at all. Look closely at every entry, especially the negative ones, to see how accurate it is.
Dispute letters have to be sent whenever you find a mistake on your credit report. Check which company’s credit report the mistake is on and send a dispute letter to that credit bureau. If the same mistake is reflected on multiple credit reports, dispute letters have to be sent to each different credit bureau that listed the mistaken entry. Once the letter is sent, you have to follow up to make sure the investigation is done properly and leads to the correct resolution.
Note: Although this process is only 3 main steps, it’s more complicated than it seems from the onset. To get it done properly, it’s best to work with a reliable credit repair company in Georgia that’s been through the process many times with others. If you try to do it yourself, you might struggle through and make mistakes that cause delays or other issues instead of getting through it smoothly.
Your credit score affects your life more than you may realize. Credit scores determine if you are approved or denied a line of credit such as credit cards, bank loans, or even home loans. In many cases, employers will run your credit to see if you are able to manage money responsibly before they consider you for certain positions. Bad credit also leads to high interest rates, lower loan amounts, and generally shorter loan lengths when you are able to obtain approval. Often people with lower scores end up getting trapped in a cycle of incurring more new debt just to pay off or pay down old debt, which of course leads to an even worse credit rating. This can make it hard to save for the future, or it can even make it difficult to make ends meet.
There are several ways a Georgia credit repair company can help you improve your credit score; debt consolidation is one of them. Debt consolidation can seem overcomplicated if you don’t know much about finance, but it’s really easy to understand. Consolidating your debt is simply the process of putting all your bills together into one payment, and shortening your total re-payment time to about one to four years. If you happen to have a very high amount of debt, and then your consolidation may take as long as five years. Consolidation of debt has a variety of names:
Regardless of what it’s called the process is pretty much the same. There are a few ways to achieve your consolidation, the most common being a loan tailored to your debt repayment needs. This is not the only way to consolidate debt, and a Georgia credit repair agency will be able to work with you to create a customized solution that fits your needs.
Many consumers are under the impression that debt consolidation only covers credit card debt, but it also covers medical bills, personal loans, departmental store cards, small business bills under a consumer’s name, and collection accounts. Mortgages and federal student loans have their own re-payment programs and thus don’t qualify for debt consolidation. That being said if you are drowning in debt and have a dismal credit score, consolidation and credit repair is an effective way to go about improving your credit and getting your life back on track.
Getting your debt under control is one of the important steps in credit repair. In addition to managing debt, a credit repair company will also help to remove negative marks on your credit report. Consolidating past due debts and collections items into a single bill will allow credit repair companies to have the individual accounts removed. As you pay down your consolidated bill, the other accounts will start to fall off which will help boost your score over time. When you pair on-time consolidation payments with a lack of collections accounts on your credit report, your score will start to recover and your payment history will also show the progress you have made towards financial management. In many cases, debt consolidation will pay off various creditors and put those debts under one company. So not only will your late and overdue payments disappear, your accounts will be listed as paid off which is good news for your credit score.
Depending on how many inaccurate entries you have on your credit report, you can significantly impact your credit score. The more inaccurate entries there are, there better the results from credit repair will be. Payment history is one of the biggest factors in calculating your credit score, so if there are false negative entries on your credit report, they can really drag down your score for no legitimate reason.
The cost range for credit repair varies a lot, depending on which company you choose to work with. The entire range is somewhere between $99 - $229 per month, but the average cost of credit repair in Georgia is closer to $139 per month. You may need to pay a one-time fee for setup at the beginning of your contract period with some credit repair companies, but this will normally be lower than or the same as the monthly fee.
In Georgia, the average time it takes to complete credit repair is around 3 – 6 months. This time range is so wide because credit bureaus are notorious for taking a long time to settle disputes, no matter how prompt you are in getting back to them. Having a dedicated company working on your issue helps it get settled as fast as possible, in spite of delays from the credit bureaus themselves.
All cities in Georgia are equally eligible for credit repair. There are no specific restrictions on the towns or cities where you can get credit repair. From Atlanta, Columbus, Savannah, and Roswell to Bonanza, Ocilla, Shannon, and Greenville, every city in Georgia is able to access reliable credit repair from an experienced credit service organization in the Peach State or even out-of-state.