Handwritten Letters?
Silly Credit Repair Suggestions
By Daniel Muniz

Perhaps the silliest suggestion I have ever seen about credit repair is a recommendation to hand write all disputes to the credit bureaus or Consumer Reporting Agencies (CRA). The purpose is for the CRAs to take your disputes more seriously because of the authenticity involved.

I have also seen this suggestion applied to sending correspondence to creditors as well, especially when sending a goodwill letter or for asking for a debt settlement on a past due account.

On the surface, such a piece of advice may seem plausible but in all reality it will have little impact other than making the disputes or requests subject to scorn and ridicule by the recipients.

I can understand the notion of wanting to appear as authentic as possible to the credit bureaus when disputing credit items but the business world doesn’t function that way. Long before computers and word processing software became commonplace, there were typewriters. And in the latter half of the past century, the typewriters were even electric.

For quite a number of decades, formal standards existed on how to send professional business letters using old fashioned typewriters. And even before electric typewriters, the business world loathed hand written correspondence. Using a typewritten letters was the way business was done.

Even the emergence of computers did not alter the formal standards that business letters were written in. In fact, word processing software enhanced the format and gave easy access to everyone for better and more efficient ways for business correspondence.

As a result, you are not going to score too extra points or impress the credit bureaus with a hand written letter.

In fact, the CRAs have gotten more automated and impersonal. They now assign a two letter code to your dispute and forward a message to the creditor in question. The creditor never sees your original dispute. And for the most part, that is the limit of many investigations. Even the credit bureau forms have a checkbox for the reason of your dispute. They really prefer not to have any explanations at all.

Consequently, the CRAs rarely do any kind of real investigations when you dispute a credit item. And that is the reason why so many people heap so much criticism on them.

A credit bureau is a private business and they make money by selling your credit report to anyone who has cold hard cash to buy it, provided that they have your permission. Ensuring that your credit report is accurate and free from error represents a cost instead of revenue. As a result, the credit bureaus are inclined to devote as few resources as possible and to streamline the process when they receive disputes.

That is not to say that they never send out personalized responses instead of their form letters. However, it is very rare but it does happen. Even I have gotten a personalized correspondence from Experian about a dispute I sent but as I said, it was very rare for that to happen because it takes time and effort. And the credit bureaus do not make money in things that do not produce revenue.

Accordingly, using a computer to write out disputes is a great tool. I have sent hundreds of letters to each credit bureau in my effort to remove errors and violations. And it was easy for me to efficiently organize my files and to use previous letters as a template for future disputes. Naturally, you cannot do that with handwritten letters and the process to write out a dispute by hand is very tedious and time consuming. The computer just allows for greater effectiveness especially if you are challenging quite a number of trade lines.

Recently, I did see the “handwritten” suggestion surface again when the credit bureaus began to refuse to investigate disputes because they assumed that people were using credit repair clinics. For a number of consumers, including myself, it was extremely frustrating for a CRA to make such an outrageous asinine assumption especially when people wrote out the letters themselves. I was very aggravated the first time it happened to me.

However, there was absolutely no urgency to resort to handwritten letters even though such a correspondence would make it impossible for a credit bureau to assume that a credit repair organization was being utilized. Instead, just include the following postscript at the end of every dispute sent to the CRAs:

I alone wrote this formal complaint in its entirety. I had no assistance from any third party such as a credit repair clinic; therefore you are obligated under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) to fully investigate this consumer dispute.

When the CRAs began sending me their bogus refusal letters because of their foolish assumptions, I simply inserted that postscript and the silly non-sense immediately stopped.

Overall, use your computer to the fullest extent possible. The business world has accepted professionally written letters for decades so you are not at any sort of disadvantage if your dispute looks clean and crisp. And hopefully the idea of using a handwritten letters to correspond with the CRAs will die a quiet death.

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