Credit Repair Services

With the recession now in a confirmed double-dip, there isn't much getting away from the fact that more people than ever are struggling financially. One of the factors behind a sluggish economy is the fact that people are not spending . . . which is something they won't do if they don't have enough cash to make ends meet.

One thing that has been emerging in the UK however is the "credit repair" service. These have been popular in the USA for some time but have fallen from grace since the economic figures have started to pick up gradually. Now they seem to be over here.

Essentially, this is an advert for someone to help improve a bad credit rating on your behalf and yes, you've guessed it - you need to pay them a fee to do so.

Warning bells ought to be sounding here. For starters, although it's tempting to let someone else sort out your mess, the first step to credit repair is taking ownership of the situation. One of the main causes of bad credit is over-spending and failing to budget properly. This can still continue if someone is taking over your payments to creditors and the additional service you are paying for will fail unless this basic discipline is managed.

It's also a tempting thought to let a middle-man deal with your creditors, but that doesn't always happen either. If you owe people or are having trouble with makign repayments, just about every credit firm has a team of people specially hired to contact you to find out when and how much you will repaying. Imagine if you loaned someone £100 and they didn't pay it back . . . would you let that slide? I certainly wouldn't. Don't expect a team of credit recovery agents to remember to call someone else when they have your number on their files.

No-one likes having bad credit - I certainly didn't. If someone had offered me the choice to pay some money for someone else to make it go away I'd have been seriously tempted but to be honest, at the time I didn't even have the spare cash for that. Instead I had to knuckle down and sort out my own mess, and you nkow - it's possible. By using your credit report, budgeting sensibly and making some hard decisions in the short term about what I could afford, things started to pick up.

No need for third partis taking more money that I couldn't afford, to pay the same people I needed to settle debts with anyway!

If you are having problems with repayments then there are free services you can use to approach lenders to make repayment plans. Many will also be responsive if you contact them up front and settle on a repayment figure. Again, this doesn't have to involve additional expense or third parties.

I'm reminded of a carnival booth with all of this; if someone is telling you something's too good to be true . . . it usually is!