As anyone who has researched credit repair has heard, you have the right to repair your own credit. In fact, Dr. Randy Padawer, who co-wrote the best selling "FICO(R) 850" seminar for The Motley Fool and "Credit Revolution: Path of the Smart Consumer", became a credit expert by becoming an uber-do-it-yourselfer when it comes to self credit repair.

You have probably also read that you can dispute the inaccurate negative items in your credit reports for free. Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion even provide a form on their respective websites to make this process easy for you.

Something that you likely will not hear as often is that credit repair is rarely as simple as it initially seems. On its surface, repairing your own credit seems to be an easy process. You get a copy of your credit reports, find each of the inaccurate credit listings, dispute them with the credit bureaus, and wait for the bureaus to perform their investigations. Of course, if it really were that easy, there would be no need for any of the dozens of reputable credit repair companies.

As you continue researching the process of self credit repair, you will start to understand the difficulties of working to repair your credit score. You will find that it is not uncommon for the credit bureaus to reject your disputes or to verify a negative item that is actually inaccurate. You will find that repairing your credit reports may involve also working with your creditors and if they are unresponsive to your needs, invoking your rights under the FCBA to force them to update or remove inaccurate listings. If you have inaccurate collections accounts listed on your credit reports, you may find that you also need to work with the reporting collections agencies in a similar fashion by taking advantage of your rights under the FDCPA.

Add to this that when dealing with each of these entities, you will find there are set protocols that if not observed could hurt your credit repair efforts. Even more, there are some pitfalls you will need to be aware of and avoid to make sure your credit rating does not get worse as a result of your credit repair efforts.

The benefits of correcting your credit reports can be huge but the process is not always easy and not without risk. If things go poorly, working to repair your own credit could hurt your credit score and even result in you being sued. For this reason, anyone looking to repair their own credit should adequately research the process before they begin.

As mentioned above, Dr. Padawer became a credit expert by educating himself about how people can repair their own credit. For most people, however, becoming a credit expert is not the goal. The goal is to correct the errors in their credit reports and this is why credit repair firms exist.

In 2004, Lexington Law, the trusted leaders in credit repair, conducted a study of over 2,000 of our clients. A finding from this study showed that almost 40 of those surveyed had attempted to repair their own credit before enlisting the help of the firm. Even through credit repair is something you can do for yourself "at little or no cost" according to the FTC, these people found it was easier to pay for Lexington Law's credit repair services than to keep working on repairing their own credit.

Negative listings on credit reports have some of the biggest effects on your credit score. A few late payments can make the difference between getting approved for a favorable interest rate on a mortgage or other type of loan and being required to make a substantial down payment just to qualify for financing. Major blemishes like charge-offs, liens, and foreclosures have the potential to drop your credit score so much that you will have difficulty getting approved for credit, regardless of the terms.

So what do you do when there are negative items on a credit file that shouldn't be there? Credit reporting mistakes do happen and negative listings are incorrectly added to consumers' credit reports all the time. And what about negative listings that are accurate but there was a perfectly good reason for why they exist? Is it really fair to require that you deal with a bad credit rating for up to 10 years when the damaging listings on your credit reports were completely out of your control?

The Fair Credit Reporting Act gives consumers a few options for dealing with poor credit, and enforcing their right to a fair and accurate credit score. This includes your right to request free copies of your credit reports so you can see what information they contain as well as the right to dispute items on your credit reports that you feel may be inaccurate, untimely, misleading, incomplete, ambiguous, unverifiable, biased or unclear.

Another antiquated option you have as a result of this act is the ability to add a 100 word statement to your credit reports explaining to creditors the circumstances behind negative items on your credit reports. The idea is that when referencing your credit reports, lenders will be able to take into account the reasons behind these negative listings when considering a loan application.

What makes this statement antiquated is that these days, lenders rarely look at the individual items in your credit reports. In fact, they may never see your reports at all so your carefully crafted 100-one hundred word statements would never be read.

On top of that, lenders are most interested in your credit score, which does not take the one hundred word statement into account. No matter how reasonable your justification is for having a negative listing on your credit reports, your credit score will remain unchanged.

The only way to keep negative items from affecting your credit score is to have them removed from your credit report. One option people have for attempting to do this is the credit bureau dispute described in the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Additional credit repair options are made available through a number of other consumer protection acts targeted towards creditors and collections agencies.