Having a bad credit score is like having a dark cloud looming over your head, following you everywhere. Whether you’ve made one too many late payments or suffered a financial breakdown, bad credit repair is necessary. It your score remains bad, you can have difficulty getting approved for loans and struggle with increasing interest rates. Here are a few steps on how to go about repairing your bad credit.

 1. Find Out Your Score

You can’t repair something that you don’t know is broken, and you can fix your score if you aren’t aware how bad it is. Find out what your score is and obtain a report from the three major credit-reporting bureaus. Compare your score with the reports to determine what information has affected it the most. If any of the reports differs drastically from the others, there may be an error. However, if they are all similar, determine what other factors are the culprit. The culprit could be late payments or your debt-to-credit ratio. Whatever the reason, it is important to be in the know so you can begin to solve the problem.

2. Dispute Any Errors

If you find an error, be sure not to ignore it. You can dispute it by sending a letter to the credit-reporting bureau and filling out a form online. Make copies to provide with the dispute. If you speak directly to anyone or receive anything back from the bureau, be sure to keep the documentation in a safe place or make extra copies for safekeeping. The bureau will have 30 days to respond to your dispute. If they do not confirm the entry, the error is required to be deleted.

 3. Set up a Payment Plan

If your credit is suffering simply because of an unpaid bill, make sure you either pay it off or set up a payment plan. When you check through your report, you may be surprised to find unpaid bills from your past that have long since been forgotten. Make sure you pay off those, and then set up payment plans for any other bills to ensure you don’t get behind again. Late payments for bills of any amount can not only increase your interest rate but also severely inhibit your score. Bad credit repair begins and ends with paying each bill on time.

Manage Your Finances Consistently for Best Results

A good score can be earned by doing the right thing consistently. While you can automate your payments each month to ensure you will never miss a payment again, it is also important to make sure there are adequate funds in your account to supplement those payments. Managing your finances requires discipline and bad credit repair takes time and patience. In the end, the financial freedom can be liberating and can increase your chances of getting approved for loans.