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Repairing Credit After Bankruptcy

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By themoneyking


If you’ve gone through the bankruptcy process, it can feel as though repairing credit after bankruptcy is all but impossible. However, you can repair your credit if you’ve declared bankruptcy – if you know how to go about doing it.

The first though you should do right after bankruptcy discharge is to look at your current credit report. There are a lot of credit agencies online that you can order your credit report from to instantly see it.

You need to check for any inconsistencies or errors you find. If you find any, be sure to report them to the credit agency that publishes the report (there are three main credit agencies).

When you look at your credit reports, you need to do three things. The first thing is that you want to make sure bankruptcy is been noted on each of the credit reports. If you have filed for Chapter 13 debt protection, you especially want this to be on your report. The next thing you want to do is make sure there are no errors on the credit report. All debts should reflect your current information. The last thing you need to do is to make sure your credit report doesn’t contain any sort of surprise.

To repair your credit, you first need to start somewhere. And this is to know exactly what’s on your credit report.


The next thing to do is to look for discrepancies; if you find any, you need to contact the publisher of the report to fix or investigate the error. Credit reports just don’t fix themselves – you will have to actively hunt down errors and report them. Also not that one credit report might have the correct information, but the other two credit reports from the other companies might have wrong information. You want to make sure all 3 credit agencies have the accurate information.

The final thing you need to do for repairing credit after bankruptcy is to open up some new credit accounts that you can easily pay off. This will help to reestablish your credit history.

Now, for some people this can be tricky, especially if they are coming right out of a bankruptcy. Credit card companies will usually not give out an unsecured credit card to bankrupts until 2 years after the bankruptcy discharge.

You should try applying anyways, but there is a high possibility that you won’t get accepted. You can also take a look online and visit some bad credit lenders’ websites. There are a lot of online lenders who specialize in giving credit cards to bankrupts. You should at least look at their websites to see the terms. Keep in mind that you will probably pay a much higher interest rate though.

Finally, if you can’t find a way to get an unsecured credit card, visit a bank (or apply online) for a secured credit card. You put down a couple hundred dollars which will be used as the credit limit for the card. This will help your credit in a couple of ways. The first you will have to create a savings account for the card, And second, if you use the card to buy items each month and pay it off at the end of the month, you will improve your credit score.

I suggest you look at these other bankruptcy hubs:

Repairing credit after bankruptcy can be a lot of work, but the effort is worth it. By getting your credit history back on track, you set yourself up in a good position to apply for large loans like car financing or even a mortgage. But you have to start small first. There are a lot of resources out there to help your with credit repair after bankruptcy. I suggest you look around on the web and visit websites that specialize in helping you with this. Professional advice will help you improve your score as fast as possible.

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Slash Debt profile image

Slash Debt  says:
3 months ago

One of the things that you mentioned as an essential step in repairing credit after bankruptcy is to know exactly what appears on your credit report. I agree with you.

So one thing I wanted to add is how long bankruptcy actually remains on a person's credit report. Chapter 7 bankruptcy stays on your credit report for 10 years, and Chapter 13 bankruptcy stays on your credit report for 7 years.

Both Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 bankruptcy stay on your public records for 20 years.

And finally, one recommendation I have in terms of getting approved for new credit accounts is to start with a gas card or department store card. It is typically very easy to get approved for such forms of credit, as you do not need to have a pristine credit score to do so.

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