INTRODUCTION

The LA Times, March 2009, printed a shocking and depressing story about a lady who had lost a lot of money when her bank was declared insolvent.  She had finally sold her house and received a check for $360,000.  She deposited the check into her bank account until she could figure out what she was going to do with the money.  A week later the bank was declared insolvent and she lost $130,000 (the amount not covered by FDIC insurance).  Her money didn’t just suddenly evaporate into thin air.  It was not lost or spent, but merely shifted over to the bank’s account to be used to now pay the bank’s debts.  This may sound preposterous and it is, but it is true.  This is the way the financial system works.  Knowing the rules would have saved this lady her $130,000. 

The LA Times, May 1, 2009, Mortgage Reduction Bill fails to pass the Senate.  “… Democratic leaders were furious to see bankers lobbying against consumer protection measures after Congress had approved enormous sums to shore up the financial services industry.  “I am sick and tired of being asked to give billions to these banks,” said Senate Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who threatened to oppose any further industry bailouts.  “If they [the banks] have no sympathy for homeowners facing foreclosure, I don’t have any sympathy for them.”  – Can you believe that a senator could make such an insensitive statement!

We are witnessing a global recession like none ever before seen in history.  While in the past individual countries have had economic downturns, we have never seen all the countries in the world experience an economic meltdown at the same time.  The impact of this magnitude may take decades to reset economies back to what they were before the world economic collapse. 

Some people will come away from the collapse of financial systems much richer, some unscathed, but many will be financially affected in some way or possibly devastated beyond what they can recover over the rest of their lifetime.  Millions of people all over the world are going through hell trying to save the assets they have worked to build over their entire lifetime. 

The pathetic thing is most people – people like you – who have been hurt by the collapse of the financial system are not in their dismal situations because of anything they have done.  You have acted responsibly, you worked hard to get where you are, you paid your bills on time, and you put aside what you could for your children’s education, a special purchase, and your retirement.  And now it’s gone.  You are a victim of the financial system’s greed and its intent to fleece America and the world. 

Many victims have lost everything they own while helplessly watching the vultures pick up their assets at pennies on the dollar of their real worth.  You watch helplessly as those most responsible for the global recession are imbued with huge amounts of taxpayer’s dollars.   You, the victim of greed, are told that for one reason or another you do not qualify for a share of the bailout.  What hurts even more is reading about the lavish parties and the extravagant living of the financial moguls, now that they have assured the security of their own assets through their government friends, lobbyists, and skullduggery.

The question foremost in your mind is, “Is there anything that I can do to save my assets in this recession?  This is obviously why you purchased our book.

Point one; your major obstacle to overcome is time.  Eventually the economy will recover and this recession will become only a bad memory.  We have gone through downturns in the economy several times in the past few decades.  This one will also eventually pass on.

Point two; to buy time you need access to money.  Hopefully you will be able to juggle bill paying to stay out of foreclosure and bankruptcy long enough to see the turn around in the economy, get your job back, increase sales, etc.

Point three; one of your major hurdles for survival may well be your credit score.  Our financial system has become so dependent upon the credit report and credit score that it seems no one believes the system can function without it. 

Point four; the curious thing about the credit reporting system is that it is flawed and no one seems to care to fix it.  Credit reporting is all about compiling and selling information.  It is not about creating an adjunct system that serves to make this a better world in which we live.

You purchased this book because it promised to show you how to do credit score repair like the professionals.  We stated that the other books on the market do not offer this insider information; the real power of credit score repair.  This is what we started out to write about when Mark and I got together.  And we will deliver on that promise.

However, before we get into credit score repair it will help you to be more effective in doing credit score repair if you have an understanding of how the credit reporting and related industries function or rather why the systems are not working as they should. 

The history of credit reporting started off on a bad foot back in the late 1800s.  The first company had gotten a bad reputation based on its collecting and selling information that was not directly relevant to true credit reporting and analysis.  In addition to relevant financial data they also collected data about consumer’s personal lives and habits. 

Okay, I’ll concede that knowing a person is a sexual pervert or an alcoholic may have relevance on their creditworthiness or whether you would want them as an employee, however, there are a lot of people who have created industrial empires regardless of their perversions and drinking habits. 

The credit reporting industry has grown into four major national agencies with numerous sub-corporations, along with a couple thousand smaller local agencies.  In addition there are thousands more companies engaged in some sort of consumer data compiling and reporting in just about every industry; everything from the prescriptions we take, the groceries we buy, to the car we drive and our driving record, even the magazines we read and the type of toothpaste we buy.  It is all are recorded someplace.  There is no aspect of our lives that some organization is not busy examining and compiling data about us and selling it in some form.  It’s all about money!

I have listed just a small sampling of the many ways in which companies are compiling data about us.  Most of the ways I suspect are so intrinsic that few people even realize what is really going on.  For example, did you really think manufacturers needed all the information they request you to put on their warranty cards?  Do you really think that your grocery store club card is only about discounts?  In reality, they are about collecting information about you that can be sold.  Even though there are many companies that do the same thing as the national agencies, collect personal data, it is little known that few of these companies are governed by the laws that were written with respect to the four national consumer reporting agencies.  These companies operate unchecked.

If this is not scary enough for you, computer technology is now enabling the varied data collectors the ability to share the data they specialize in collecting.  They cross correlate data to build an even better electronic representation of who you are. 

Credit reporting, whatever its nature, was allowed to go unrestricted for decades.  However, for all of the reasons behind the Federal and state governments finally creating laws to control credit reporting, it is interesting to note that the laws are not definitive enough to clearly define all aspects of the laws’ intent.  When I questioned claims that the laws state such-and-such and could not find this information, I was told to examine the intent of the law.  Does the law state something or doesn’t it!  This is more to the point.

More important is the inability of the Federal Trade Commission (the major government organization for governing the credit reporting agencies) to audit this humungous industry as put forth by law.  Possibly the level of manpower that would be required to audit all of the consumer data collection and reporting activities would be beyond the government’s capabilities.  Thereby, the industry is pretty much left to police itself; or does it? 

There seems to be a fine line between the agencies obeying the laws vs. doing the economically affordable minimum required to meet the intent of the laws.  Companies, from the consumer reporting agencies, to the creditors that voluntarily furnish credit and other data, they are all in business to make money; lots of money. 

It costs money to provide free credit reports and to process corrections to the data they have compiled in their databases. This eats deeply into profits.  If it weren’t for the Federal Trade Commission and Federal and state laws it is questionable if the agencies and their flock would be at all concerned with consumers’ rights.

The burgeoning credit score repair industry is taxing the credit reporting system as the need for credit score repair in this recession has spawned a fast growing desperate customer base.  This has caused the agencies to find economical alternatives for handling the onslaught of disputes.  Like the attempt to try and help people through the recession is overwhelming the credit reporting system, the response to this new attack has created methods that are likewise just as devastating to the operation and credibility of the credit reporting system.

It is interesting to note that while things could have been done and could still be done to make credit reporting into a very viable and much less intrusive service, the scenario we see is predicated upon companies finding as many ways to use compiled consumer personal information to make as much money as the imagination of the companies marketing managers can conceive. 

Compiling data for the purpose of selling it in a great number of entrepreneurial ways is what credit reporting is really all about.  Credit reports and scores are only one product.  Selling information for sales leads, employment screening, apartment rental screening, are a very small sample of the many, many ways that compiled databases of personal information are being used.  Big Brother is truly able to watch us, now.  It finally has the vast empire of data furnishers supplying the system with data and powerful computers to do the job that Orson Wells envisioned. 

As I wrote this last paragraph I couldn’t help but think about the Cold War spy movies I have seen where the Russian KGB encouraged voluntary data furnishing and then compiled and abused the use of personal data they compiled.  I do not mean to infer that credit reporting is an industrialized version of the KGB.  I’m only likening the agencies to the intrusion of the KGB into Russian citizens’ personal lives and its affect on controlling peoples’ lives. 

Credit reporting agencies primary use data is to make billions of dollars.  However, there is an aspect of control as the collective bodies of companies compiling data for their respective money making purposes cross correlate the data in their databases. This data is being used to evaluate your getting a job, buying insurance, obtaining credit to buy a house or a car or even get a low limit credit card that enables you to function in a credit conditioned country. 

I happened to watch an old Robert Redford movie, “Sneakers”.  It’s was about gathering information on US citizens.  The bad guy says, “War it no longer about guns and bullets, it’s about information and knowing how to use it to control people.”  Maybe my thoughts about the old KGB movies are not that far off base. 

Just about everything written about credit score repair focuses on something called the dispute; you dispute data on your credit report.  In actuality dispute is only one of ten processes that the professional credit score repair professionals use to improve their clients’ credit scores. 

To begin with there are two aspects of credit score repair we will be examining in the book.  There is getting items on your credit report corrected which may or may not have any effect on your credit score; we will refer to this as credit report maintenance.  And there is getting as many as possible derogatory items removed from your credit report in order to improve your credit score; we call this real credit score repair. 

This use of dispute has overloaded the system’s ability to manually process disputes as creditors have been doing it for years.  The first step was to cut corners in processing disputes as the workload grew.  As the system faced becoming overwhelmed new software was implemented to automatically respond to disputes. Now, rather than taking fully documented disputes, reviewing them, and making the necessary corrections, software is simply verifying that the data that is already in the agencies’ databases is ‘as reported’; in essence saying that the Xeroxed copy matches the original.  

Just as software was created to serve a financial system that was growing too unwieldy to function with humans analyzing the ever growing number of credit applications, software was developed to automatically process disputes.  Experian has introduced e-OSCAR; an automated dispute verification software program.  The new software is a very profitable product.  However, it is questionable if the software is doing a fair job at processing disputed information as it does not have the capability to analyze fully documented dispute packages.  You might say, “It goes through the motions of processing a dispute.”

With automated verification, fully documented disputes no longer need to be reviewed with the objective to compare what the consumer has submitted with what creditors have reported to the agencies in order to verify a dispute.  Mark’s company has experienced, and there are many letters posted on internet websites complaining that the agencies are not getting incorrect data corrected.

Looking at the system from the commercial credit repair side, it is much too cumbersome to gather and submit fully documented dispute packages that contain proof that the information on the credit report is in error.  It is much easier for consumers and credit repair company professionals who understand the law to greatly reduce their effort by putting the burden of proof that the information creditors reported to the credit reporting agencies is accurate; ergo verify it!

However, as the objective of credit score repair is to get derogatory items removed from clients’ credit reports correcting data is neither an issue nor a concern.  Accurate derogatory items are no less damaging to your credit score than inaccurate data.  The catchall is that you are hoping the company that reported the data to the consumer reporting agencies, that you want removed from your credit report, will be so overloaded processing disputes that your dispute will not be answered within the legally required time frame.  If this happens you get a ‘get out jail free’ card; your data is automatically removed from your credit report with no further effort.  Well, actually it doesn’t happen!

The intent of the laws governing credit reporting was for you to be able to document an error and it would be reviewed and corrected.  The problem is that the system has become overloaded, even more so now during this recession with credit score repair taking the stand of ‘Dispute It’ as its main theme.  The credit reporting system is fraying under this new onslaught of activity.   

The endeavor to obtain the highest credit score is mandated upon the growing reliance on the three digit credit score number that can improve or destroy the value of a consumer’s life.  It has come down to the credit report and the credit score.  A bad score and/or questionable data on your credit report can make the difference between your getting a job or insurance, as well as many other aspects of life being upset. 

Which brings us back to our objective for writing this book; what can you do to protect yourself throughout the rest of this recession?  What hope do you have to save or salvage the assets you have earned over your lifetime?  The answer is, learn how to defend yourself.  Just like taking a martial arts self-defense class to learn how to physically defend yourself, there are things you can learn do to defend yourself against losing your assets.  One of the things you can do is protect your credit score.  Your credit score can deny or qualify you for loans, get better interest rates, and get a job or insurance.

Information is POWER!

Learning how to use this Power

Will enable you to protect your assets.

Learning the ins and outs of loan settlement and loan modification negotiation, and understanding the workings of the credit reporting system will prepare you for the fight ahead.  I keep hearing after-the-loss-stories; what people could have and should have done, but like me, there was no way to know what would have worked and what was folly before I got deeply involved in writing this book. 

For the millions of recession victims that have found themselves in situations seemingly beyond help the most important thing for them right now is TIME.  You need time to find a new job or get your old job back when your industry returns to some semblance of normalcy.  You need time to find some source of financial help to enable you to better weather this financial storm and eventually recover from the recession.  You need time for the stock market to rebound enough for you to afford to cash out and pay bills.  You need time for the government to pass legislature when they come to realize there are victims who still need its help that have been overlooked for one reason or another.

“Saving Your Ass-ets in a Recession” is a compilation of the works of hundreds of experts in financial and legal fields who offer enormous amounts of information on their internet websites.  It also includes a wealth of information based on what Mark and I have learned through first hand experience and what Mark has learned as an insider working credit score repair on thousands of client cases. 

It took a lot of rewriting and clarification of internet information to create “Saving Your Ass-ets in a Recession”.  Most of the internet sources were reluctant to give away too much information.  Many internet web sites scattered bits and pieces throughout their web sites.  Most put up just enough information to impress browsers that they might be experts in their fields and should thereby be trusted, but often did not give enough or concise enough information to be of any real use.

In any case, much of the technical information contained in this book is not original. It was gleaned through hundreds of hours of browsing the internet, books, technical and news articles, and conversations with individuals. I have liberally sprinkled excerpts from reports, articles, and other tidbits of information I found that express what we want to say about the credit reporting industry.  Some of the items are from government and recognized authorities in this field, which adds some authority to this book.  It is not just Mark’s and my comments and opinions. 

The glossary lists most of the source references we used.  You could gather the information contained in this book by yourself if you want to spend hundreds of hours browsing and assimilating information and then turning it into a readable and more important an understandable and useful format.

We have brought together in one volume a clear picture of how to deal with credit score repair.  Unlike other books that are filled with conceptual approaches, endless examples of how others have dealt with their financial situations that require you to interpret to figure out how they apply to your specific situation, we have striven to create a book that provides comprehensive (yet easy to read and understand) explanations of how the credit industry works and specific “How To” instructions for accomplishing your objectives – “Saving Your Ass-ets!”

We have avoided enlarging our book with fluff (wordy explanations) and filler (subjects not pertinent to the issues at hand, clipart, big line spacing, etc.).  We are offering real world information in the most concise manner possible that will enable you to learn how to strategically fight to save or salvage what is left of your assets and your financial and emotional life.  

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