a person holding a credit card in their hand — Photo by Ali Mkumbwa on Unsplash

A couple of years ago, a small business owner came to me after she’d already done the thing I’m about to tell you not to do.

Her credit had taken a beating, and she’d found a company online that promised to fix it. She paid them a few thousand dollars with money she’d borrowed from her family, and what she got in return was a debt consolidation loan with painful interest rates and terms on the edge of being illegal.

So she was out the fee, into a worse loan, and owed her family money on top of it. All to solve a problem she could have worked on herself for free.

She wasn’t foolish. She was scared and busy, and someone showed up promising to take it off her plate. That’s the industry’s entire business model.

What the Law Actually Says

Before anything else, two rules:

A credit repair company can’t charge you before it performs its services - that’s federal law, the Credit Repair Organizations Act. Federal law also requires them to give you a written contract and three business days to cancel without being charged. If someone wants money before they’ve delivered anything, you’ve learned everything you need to know in the first thirty seconds.
Nobody can remove accurate negative information- not a company, not a lawyer, not you. If the late payment happened, it stays until it ages off, generally around seven years, though some items like bankruptcy can stay longer. Anyone promising to erase a legitimate debt is either lying to you or planning something that will cause you a much larger problem later.

Those two rules preempt most of what gets advertised.

The Industry Is Having a Bad Year

In August 2026, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) went to court over a credit repair operation called Credit Glory, and a federal judge in Arizona temporarily halted it.

I want to be precise, because this is an ongoing case. The FTC alleges that a network of related companies and five individuals took nearly $200 million from consumers through illegal upfront fees and recurring charges, and that they bought Google search ads designed to intercept people looking up debts they owed, then had telemarketers answer as though they were the actual creditor. The FTC also alleges the operation specifically targeted military service members.

Those are allegations. Nobody has been found liable, and a court will decide it.

The tactics described are familiar ones in credit repair enforcement, which is the useful part for you.

The red flags:

They want money upfront,
They promise to remove accurate information,
They tell you to dispute everything on your report, including things you know are correct,
They suggest establishing a “new credit identity” (which is fraud), and
they never mention you could do this yourself.

A legitimate company basically does for you what you could do yourself with more time. They pull your credit reports, which are free at AnnualCreditReport.com. They read them looking for inaccuracies. They file disputes. They follow up.

A legitimate company will also organize your records and track deadlines, and that has some value if you’re overwhelmed.

But at the end of the day, that’s the service: reviewing reports, identifying inaccuracies, disputing them, and following up. The FTC’s own guidance says you have the legal right to do all of it yourself for little or no cost.

First Question: Can You Actually Pay Your Bills?

Before any of the improvement steps, this one, because if the answer is no, then nothing below matters yet, and you need something different from me.

I worked with someone a while back who had gotten in over her head. Several buy now, pay later loans, an adjustable-rate mortgage that adjusted, and she reached the month where there wasn’t enough money to cover everything on the table.

What we agreed on, and I want to be honest that it felt awful to say out loud: credit rating be damned. When there isn’t enough money, the job is to protect your life, not a number.

The mistake people make here is sorting by type of bill. The right way to sort is by consequence, and consequences differ from household to household.

First, anything with an immediate consequence to your health, housing, or ability to work. Rent or mortgage. Food. Utilities. Medications. Insurance. Child care. For the woman I was working with, this tier also included her car, because she lived somewhere public transit wasn’t a real option, so no car meant no job meant no recovery. Your version of that might be something else entirely. The test isn’t what category the bill falls into; it’s what breaks if you don’t pay it.

Second, secured debts attached to something you can’t afford to lose. A car you need for work. A house. These have repossession and foreclosure behind them, which is a different order of consequence from a collections call.

Third, minimum payments wherever you can manage them, with credit cards at the top of this group. Not because they matter more than a utility bill, but because they do longer-lasting damage. Every 30 days late gets reported and sits on your file for years.

Then everything else, again sorted by what actually happens if you fall behind.

Two things I’d add that I wish more people knew.

Call before you miss, not after. Most creditors have hardship programs, and almost nobody asks. A call placed a week early gets you options. A call placed after the delinquency reports gets you sympathy.

The loudest creditor isn’t always the most consequential one. Some companies will call you weekly. Others go quiet for 29 days and then report something that follows you for seven years. If you triage by who is contacting you most, you’ll get the order wrong. I want to be clear that a quiet bill isn’t a harmless one, though. Utilities go to collections too, and shutoff risk can escalate faster than people expect—sort by consequence, not by volume, and not by silence either.

If you’re in this position, a nonprofit credit counselor is worth a call. National Foundation for Credit Counseling member agencies provide counseling at low or no cost and can set up a debt management plan that may reduce payments or finance charges, without another consolidation loan on top of everything.

Now, the Five Things That Move a Score

Assuming you’re current on your bills, here’s the whole DIY playbook, in the order that matters.

1. Turn on autopay, then keep reading the statements

Payment history is roughly 35% of your score, the biggest single factor, and a reported late payment is far harder to undo than high utilization.

My own credit damage in my twenties happened because I forgot I had a card. Not because I couldn’t pay it. Because it left my head entirely, Autopay for at least the minimum on every account removes a whole category of failure.

One caution, since I’ve watched this go wrong. Autopay is not permission to stop looking. Review the statement every month anyway, because autopay will faithfully pay a fraudulent charge, a doubled subscription, or a fee you’d have disputed.

2. Pull your reports and dispute what’s wrong

Get all three at AnnualCreditReport.com, free, weekly if you want.

Read them looking for: accounts that aren’t yours, payments marked late that you made on time, accounts listed as open that you closed, wrong balances or limits, the same debt appearing twice, and negatives that should have aged off.

The errors that catch people usually aren’t typos. They’re residue from life events.

When Karen and I went to buy our house, I had already sold my interest in a home to my ex-wife. She’d taken over the mortgage. But it never came off my credit report, and neither of us had thought about it in years. So we ran the report, and there it was, a whole property still sitting on my file as though I owned it.

Untangling it wasn’t complicated. I called my ex-wife, who called her mortgage company, which notified the bureau. But it took about a week, and that week involved a lot of anxiety in the middle of buying a house.

Divorces, business sales, refinances, closed joint accounts. That’s where errors live. If you’ve been through any of them, look specifically.

When you dispute, file with both the credit bureau and the company that reported the information. The CFPB recommends both, and it’s more effective than the bureau alone. Investigations are generally completed within about 30 days. Keep the dispute specific, include documentation, and only dispute what’s genuinely wrong. Blanket-disputing everything is a scam-company tactic, and it can backfire.

3. Attack utilization

How much of your available credit you’re using is roughly 30% of your score, and it can improve relatively quickly once lower balances get reported, which usually happens monthly. That makes it the fastest real lever you have.

Pay balances down. This is the best option if you can do it.

Ask for a credit limit increase. This lowers utilization without you paying anything, since it changes the denominator. Ask whether the issuer can do it with a soft pull. And only do this if you trust yourself not to spend into the new room.

Don’t close old cards. People close cards to be responsible, and their score drops, which feels like a betrayal. Closing a card doesn’t erase its history, but it does erase its credit limit, so utilization on everything else jumps overnight. If you want an old card to stay active, add one small recurring charge and set it to autopay.

4. Add history you don’t have

If your file is thin rather than damaged, this section is for you.

Consider becoming an authorized user, but do it carefully. On an account with a long history and low balances, held by someone you trust, this can help. But it runs both ways: high balances or missed payments on that account can hurt you too; newer scoring models give authorized user accounts less weight than your own; and it’s a supplement to building credit in your own name rather than a replacement for it.

Get a secured card if you’re rebuilding. You put down a deposit, usually a few hundred dollars, and it becomes your credit limit. Choose one that reports to all three major bureaus, since that’s the entire point and not all of them do. Look for little or no annual fee and a path to graduating to an unsecured card with your deposit returned. It’s the standard route back, and there’s no shame in it.

Get your rent reported. As I wrote last time, VantageScore 4.0 can use reported rent and certain utility data, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac now accept VantageScore 4.0 from mortgage lenders nationwide. The catch is that your rent only helps if it’s actually reaching the bureaus, and most landlords don’t report. Several services will do it for a small monthly fee. If your file is thin, that’s worth investigating.

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5. Ask for grace

If you have one late payment on an otherwise clean account, contact the creditor and ask whether they’re willing to make a one-time goodwill adjustment. Explain what happened, point to your history, be brief and polite.

It often doesn’t work, and it costs you a stamp. Note that this is asking a creditor for a favor on something accurate, which is completely different from disputing something as an error. Don’t dispute an accurate late payment.

A Word on Consolidation

Debt consolidation is a real tool. Moving high-interest card debt to a lower-interest personal loan can genuinely reduce what you pay and get you out faster. I’ve helped friends do exactly that.

It’s also the product that gets sold to you after the fee, which is what happened to the woman I opened with. So here are four questions to ask before you sign anything.

“What will this cost me in total?” Not the monthly payment. The total. Take the payment, multiply it by the number of months, and compare that to what you owe now. A loan with a smaller payment stretched over more years is frequently more expensive than the debt it’s replacing. The monthly number is the one they’ll lead with, because it’s the one that sounds good.

“What’s the APR?” You’ll see an interest rate advertised, and that number usually leaves out the fees. Plenty of lenders charge you a percentage of the loan just for making the loan, taken right off the top, so you borrow $15,000 and $14,400 actually arrives. That’s called an origination fee, and you’ll want to recognize it on paper. The APR is the number that folds the fees back in, which makes it the only fair way to compare one offer against another. Ask for it by name.

“Can this rate go up, and when?” A rate that’s low for the first year and then resets isn’t a low rate. It’s a low first year. Get a straight answer about whether the rate is locked for the life of the loan or only for a while.

“What happens if I’m late?” Some of these loans carry penalty rates or fees that make a bad month considerably worse. Better to know now than to find out.

And one thing that isn’t a question. Whatever you consolidate, don’t run the cards back up. Paying off five cards with a loan and then refilling those same five cards is the most common way this goes wrong, and it leaves you carrying both.

One more for homeowners our age…If you consolidate credit card debt using a home equity loan or HELOC, understand exactly what you’ve done: you’ve converted unsecured debt into debt secured by your house. The rate looks better because the lender’s risk went down, and the reason their risk went down is that they can now take your home. Sometimes that’s still the right trade but make sure you know what is at risk.

The Best Consolidation I Ever Saw

Back in college, a friend had charged far too much to a credit card and started missing payments. His parents had the means to step in, and they did. He paid them back in full, on a schedule that worked, on terms no lender would offer, with nothing reported to anyone.

Nice work if you can get it.

I mention it because the difference between that outcome and a much worse one wasn’t judgment, effort, or character. It was who his parents were.

That’s worth holding onto the next time someone implies a credit score measures how responsible a person is. It measures credit history. It doesn’t measure virtue, or effort, or what resources happened to be available to you.

And About Cosigning

I told you about Tom and John in the last article, so here's the rule: When you cosign, you are not vouching for someone. You are borrowing the money alongside them. Their missed payments become your missed payments and land on your report the same as if you’d spent it yourself.

If you wouldn’t hand them the cash as an outright gift, don’t cosign.

The Whole Thing, Free

Pull your reports. Turn on autopay and keep reading the statements. Dispute what’s wrong with both the bureau and the furnisher. Bring your balances down. Add history if your file is thin.

That’s what a few thousand dollars was supposed to buy.

The credit repair industry exists because people don’t know they can do this themselves, and because the moment you most need help is the moment you’re least able to judge who’s offering it. Everything a credit repair company can legally do to dispute your report, you can generally do yourself for little or no cost.

And if what you actually need isn’t dispute letters but a plan for the debt itself, that’s a different service with a different name. Use a reputable nonprofit credit counselor.

The Midlife Money Playbook

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