Excessive inquiries on your credit report can short circuit your loan efforts with any lender.
The first thing you have to understand is how inquiries get on your credit report. Any time you apply for credit from any bank, department store or other creditors, they call up a credit report on you. This is called any inquiry, an d the name of the bank will be listed under inquiries for two years. In some cases you will find a bunch of letters and numbers with no names explaining who they are. You will need to 14514l117o ask your credit bureau to verify the names of these individuals.
Unfortunately it is now a common practice for car salesmen to run a credit report on you at 10 different finance companies. Before he spends time showing you dozens of cars, he wants to make sure that you will be approved for the one that you want to buy. If he can't get you approved for ANYTHING, he will move on to the next person. Leaving 10 different inquiries in his wake.
Naturally, if you have many inquiries listed, it looks like you are in financial trouble and are applying for loans all over the city. If four or more inquiries appear on a credit report within a two month period, a message of Trans- Alert is listed on the credit report. This alerts creditors that you have applied for credit an excessive number of times. Trans-Alert appears on the TransUnion statement. Sometimes banks screen your account to see if you will qualify for their credit card promotions and this just adds one problem upon another.
To correct this problem, I believe it is the easiest to deal with the creditor dispute method where you direct your correspondence to the company that listed the inquiry on your report.
In your letter you must ask them for proof that you authorized them to check your credit rating. If they cannot find that proof, they will have to get the inquiry taken off the credit report.
Many times, creditors do not have the time to go back into their records and verify your account, so automatically you win, and it will be deleted off your credit report.
You can also dispute directly with the credit bureau and ask what legitimate business reason they had to give your personal credit information out to "Company Name". If they can not provide this information, please remove the inquiry.
Do not type your letters, write them in your own hand writing and use your own words as much as possible. Typing makes the credit bureaus think you are using a credit repair service.
Do not send mail by "Certified Mail."
Do use your own paper or the dispute forms that come with your credit reports.
Do not use legal language.
Do not apply for credit during the dispute process, it could reverse any results you have attained.
Do not call the credit bureaus for any reason! Always correspond through the mail and make copies of your correspondence.
Do keep copies of everything the bureaus send you.
Do be patient but do not give up. Millions of people have had negative items removed from their credit report!
Do not threaten the credit bureaus or tell them that you will hire an attorney if they don't take the disputed items off of your credit report. They know they have to follow the law. Threats will get you no where.
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