How the Process Works

When you apply through this website, you can either decide on a service plan or give us a little information about what you want to accomplish and we will recommend a service plan to help you reach your goals. You can learn about the various service plans here. Once you have let us know which service plan you would like to pursue, we will send you the forms, and you should fill them out and fax, email or send via US mail to us.

If you have recent credit reports from all three bureaus, you can simply send us those reports so that we can review your credit situation for you. If you don't have this type of credit report, you can get your three reports free of charge by clicking here.

1st Rate will review your credit reports and with your input, identify those items that we believe have the best chance of being removed or corrected. If we don't believe that we can help you achieve positive results, we won't take your case and you will not be charged anything at all for the initial review.

Once we have agreed to take your case, if you have selected either service plan, we will immediately put the various components of those plans into place, including activating your identity theft protection. We then begin the dispute process by initiating correspondence with the credit bureaus that are reporting the negative information, requesting verification of the adverse reports. The credit bureaus must then contact the credit grantors who submitted the negative reports to get the documentation from them. The credit bureaus have a 30 to 45 day deadline to verify or remove the items being challenged. Often, they try different stall tactics to get around those deadlines.

Eventually, they will either get sufficient documentation to support the negative listing or concede that the item cannot be documented, at which point the item is removed.
As a matter of course, the credit bureaus will respond to you directly. This means that you have to be responsible about forwarding the communications you receive from the credit bureaus promptly to us, so that we know how to proceed on your behalf.

The first results from the credit repair effort may not become apparent until 60 days after the repair process was started, and results should be apparent every 30-45 days thereafter. Updates and notifications of dispute will be sent to you upon receipt of responses and subsequent new challenges.

Your job is mainly to receive, read and forward the responses from the credit bureaus. Once you have received a response, please send it on to us as quickly as possible so that we can pursue the next step.