Payment history
Whether you paid on time, and how badly you did not.
Tampa, Florida · Credit repair & credit education
The number is not the point. The arithmetic behind it is.
Five inputs decide a credit score, and two of them decide two-thirds of it. We read all three of your reports line by line, dispute what is actually wrong, and show you the working — including the parts that are not in our favour.
- No fee before the work is performed
- Three-day right to cancel, in writing
- No score promised, ever
Illustrative sample fileFICO 8
Band scale, as a table
| Band | From | To | Sample sits here |
|---|---|---|---|
| Poor | 300 | 579 | — |
| Fair | 580 | 669 | — |
| Good | 670 | 739 | Yes — 712 |
| Very good | 740 | 799 | — |
| Exceptional | 800 | 850 | — |
- 35%Payment history
- 30%Amounts owed
- 15%Length of history
- 10%New credit
- 10%Credit mix
Before anything else
Everything a credit repair advert will not put this high on the page.
This category is full of unlawful marketing, and it is the marketing that gets companies sued. So here is the honest boundary of the work, above the pricing and above the testimonials, where you can actually use it.
It also means you can leave this site better informed and not hire anybody. That is a fine outcome. Take the free guide and go.
What cannot be done
Four things we will never tell you
- That your score will go up. No one can tell you that. Not a number, not a range, not a “typical” figure. Anyone who does is telling you something they cannot know.
- That it will take a specific number of days. The statutory investigation window belongs to the bureau, not to us, and outcomes are not on a schedule.
- That accurate negative information can be removed. It cannot — not by us, not by you, not by anyone. Accurate, current, verifiable entries report until their clock runs out.
- That you need us. You do not. Every right we exercise is yours already, and exercising it costs nothing. See the notice above.
Required notice
You can do all of this yourself, for free
You have the right to dispute inaccurate information in your credit report yourself, at no cost, by contacting the consumer reporting agency directly. Nothing we do requires a fee to be effective. Everything on this page is a right you already hold under the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
Get your free reports from the only federally authorised source: annualcreditreport.com. Do not pay a site that charges for them, and do not use a lookalike domain.
Our free do-it-yourself guide is the same process we run for clients, written out in full: how to read the file, what a dispute must contain, the addresses, the statutory windows, and what to do when a bureau answers “verified”. It asks for no email address and sells nothing.
Where a score comes from
Five factors. The stack is as deep as the factor is heavy.
Payment history is five sheets thick because it is 35% of the model. Credit mix is one sheet because it is 10% and is not worth taking on debt to improve. Hover or tab through a card to lift it.
35% 30% Amounts owed
Mostly revolving utilisation — what you owe against your limits.
15% Length of credit history
The age of your oldest account and the average age of all of them.
10% New credit
Recent hard inquiries and recently opened accounts.
10% Credit mix
Whether you have both revolving and instalment accounts.
Weights are FICO’s published approximations for the general population. Your own file may weight them differently — someone with a thin file leans harder on length of history, and a recent serious delinquency dominates everything else.
Factor weights, as a table
| Factor | Weight | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Payment history | 35% | Whether you paid on time, and how badly you did not. |
| Amounts owed | 30% | Mostly revolving utilisation — what you owe against your limits. |
| Length of credit history | 15% | The age of your oldest account and the average age of all of them. |
| New credit | 10% | Recent hard inquiries and recently opened accounts. |
| Credit mix | 10% | Whether you have both revolving and instalment accounts. |
Tri-bureau tracking
You do not have a credit file. You have three, and they disagree.
Furnishers choose which bureaus they report to. A card can be perfect on Experian, three months stale on Equifax and entirely absent from TransUnion — and a lender pulling the wrong one sees a worse borrower than you are.
Reading one report and assuming the other two match is the single most common mistake we see. The chart beside this is a sample file: the gap between the highest and lowest bureau moves between 8 and 23 points across a year, on identical underlying behaviour.
Move a pointer across the chart, or focus it and use the arrow keys. Every value is also in the table underneath it.
How tracking worksThree bureaus, one sample file, twelve months
AugExperian644Equifax629TransUnion646
Every value, as a table
| Point | Experian | Equifax | TransUnion |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sep | 612 | 598 | 621 |
| Oct | 610 | 601 | 619 |
| Nov | 615 | 599 | 624 |
| Dec | 618 | 606 | 622 |
| Jan | 617 | 611 | 628 |
| Feb | 624 | 610 | 627 |
| Mar | 629 | 618 | 626 |
| Apr | 631 | 622 | 633 |
| May | 636 | 620 | 638 |
| Jun | 634 | 627 | 641 |
| Jul | 641 | 631 | 639 |
| Aug | 644 | 629 | 646 |
The dispute cycle
One cycle, with the statutory clock shown honestly.
The 30-day window belongs to the bureau, not to us. We cannot make it run faster, and the last rung of this ladder includes the branch most companies in this category leave off the drawing.
- Investigation window
- 30 days
- With new evidence mid-way
- 45 days
- Method of verification request
- within 15 days
We read the file and you approve the list
All three reports, line by line. Every candidate item is shown to you with the specific defect we think it has — a wrong date, a balance that does not match, a duplicate, an account that is not yours. Items we believe are accurate do not go on the list.
No statutory clock yet. This part takes as long as reading takes.
The dispute is sent, and receipt is logged
Filed with the consumer reporting agency under FCRA §611, or directly with the furnisher under §623 where that is the better route. Mail transit is real and it counts against nobody.
The clock starts when the bureau receives it, not when we send it.
The bureau’s investigation window
A consumer reporting agency must conduct a reasonable reinvestigation, free of charge, and generally complete it within 30 days of receipt. It must forward all relevant information to the furnisher, which has its own duty to investigate.
Extends to 45 days if you supply additional relevant information during the initial 30.
The result arrives, in writing
The bureau must give you written notice of the outcome and a free copy of the report if it changed. You get the full response from us, unedited, with our reading of it.
A response that arrives after day 30 without a valid extension is itself worth acting on.
It ends one of three ways, and one of them is “no”
Most drawings of this process in this industry stop at “deleted”. Here are all three branches, in the order you are most likely to meet them on an accurate file.
- Deleted
The information could not be verified, or the furnisher agreed it was wrong. It comes off, and it cannot be re-inserted unless the furnisher certifies it is accurate and you are notified within five days.
- Corrected
The entry stays but a field changes — a status, a balance, a date of first delinquency. Sometimes this matters more than a deletion, because the seven-year clock runs from that date.
- Verified — it stays
The furnisher confirmed it. This is a normal, lawful outcome and it is the one most likely for an accurate item. We request the method of verification where that is worth doing, and where the entry is accurate we tell you it is staying and stop.
- Deleted
We do not publish an outcome rate. We would have to invent one, and a number invented for a marketing page is exactly the thing this page is arguing against.
What we do
Four services, and the limits of each printed next to it.
Dispute management
We read all three reports line by line, identify entries that are inaccurate, incomplete or unverifiable, and dispute them under §611 of the Fair Credit Reporting Act — with a method-of-verification request when a bureau comes back “verified” without saying how.
We will not dispute an item we believe is accurate. Filing a knowingly frivolous dispute wastes the window and can get the whole batch dismissed.
Credit coaching
Disputes only address what is wrong on the file. Sixty-five percent of the score is driven by payment history and amounts owed — things no dispute can touch. Coaching is the part of the work that moves those.
Coaching is education, not financial advice, and we are not a law firm or a licensed financial adviser.
Tri-bureau tracking
Your three files are not the same file. Furnishers choose which bureaus they report to, so an account can be perfect on one report and missing from another. We track all three side by side and show you the divergence.
We read your reports; we do not write to them. Only a furnisher or a bureau can change what is reported.
Debt validation
When a third-party collector is reporting, the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act gives you a right they must answer: prove the debt, prove the amount, and prove you are the one entitled to collect it.
Validation does not make a valid debt go away. If the collector validates it and it is accurate, it stays.
Progress cards
Anchored to what actually changed.
Every card here names a mechanical change — a duplicate deleted, a utilisation figure, an account that started reporting to all three bureaus. None of them leads with a score, because a score jump on its own tells you nothing about what was done.
Reported revolving utilisation
78%24%Moved four statement dates; paid before the close, not before the due date.
Nobody had ever told me the balance that gets reported is the statement balance. That was the whole problem, and it cost nothing to fix.
Duplicate collection entries
20One debt was reporting twice — once by the original creditor and once by a buyer. The duplicate was deleted after a method-of-verification request.
They found the second entry, showed me the two account numbers side by side, and told me straight out the first one was accurate and was staying.
Accounts reporting to all three bureaus
3 of 66 of 6Three accounts were only being furnished to one bureau, so two of the three files were incomplete.
The file I was being judged on was missing half my good history. Nothing was removed — things were added.
Items disputed that came back verified
5 of 53 of 5Three of the five items were accurate and stayed on the report. Two contained errors and were corrected.
I wanted all five gone. Three of them were real and they said so on the first call, which is how I knew the other two were worth pushing.
Illustrative composites written for this demonstration site. They are not real clients, they carry no rating, and no page on this site publishes an average, a success rate or a client count — those numbers would have to be invented. Nothing here is a prediction of what would happen on your file.
Tampa & the bay
A local office, and a reason that matters.
Florida registers credit service organisations at the state level and requires a surety bond. That is a low bar, but it is a bar, and it means there is a named entity and a bond number attached to the work. Ours are printed in the footer of every page, exactly where you can check them.
We work with people across Hillsborough and Pinellas — Tampa, Brandon, Riverview, St. Petersburg, Clearwater — in person when it helps and by phone when it does not.
- Office
- 401 E Jackson St, Suite 2340
Tampa, FL 33602 - Phone
- (813) 555-0164
- Saturday hours
- 10:00–14:00