Do you recommend using a credit repair company and paying them to help clear up your credit report; or, try going it alone if you have the means to settle with some of the companies? It has been over the usual 180 days and most or charged off or given to collection agencies.

The answer depends 100% on your aptitude for this kind of thing AND the integrity of the credit repair company you choose to use.

I have tackled this on my own but I work in the industry and had some knowledge on how to accomplish it.

It is not that general of knowledge to do it right... that's why not everyone does it.

If you have outstanding debt, you will want to make sure you follow certain steps in order to negotiate it and make it go away, without getting ripped off from the creditor/collection agency (which happens ALL the time) and you will want to negotiate the best possible deal for you! Are you sure you know how to do that?

Also, you will want to make as much of the negative marks that are on your credit go away (late payments, charge-offs, collection accounts, etc). If you do this wrong, it could result in the permanence of said marks and all hope would then be lost for the next 7 years. Are you sure you know the proper way to do this?

If you said yes to both, then save your money and do it yourself! If not, you may want to either research the proper was to do these things or hire someone to do them for you.

First credit repair companies are not debt consolidation compaanies they are two different things.

Repair companies are not even legal in all states, since many do a lot of fraud. They merely try to challenge things on your report to get it off the report.

Here are my experiences with 2 credit repair companies: I have tried both Lexington Law and Unified Credit Services. Here is how it went:

Lexington: I signed up for their basic service to have 15 of my negative items cleaned off my credit report. Since they a charge monthly fee, I got started right away and hoped to have everything cleaned up in a matter of a few months. After about 7 months, I had only 2 items removed. SEVEN MONTHS! I read somewhere that they basically dispute one item at a time. The longer it takes them to clean your credit report, the more money they make. Ughh... it worked, but it started costing way too much and taking way too long. I canceled with them after the 7 months.
Final thought: :(

Unified Credit Services: I read somewhere that they don't charge monthly fees. They only charge per item, so right away I was on board. At this point I had 13 negative items on my credit report. I signed up for their service and they gave me a nice deal for all 13 items. They disputed all my items at one time, so within 2 months I had almost half of my items cleaned off. They proceeded again to dispute the ones that remained, and again after about 2 months, they cleaned off 4 more. I have 3 more items that they are working on right now. I don't know if they are going to be able to get those last 3 off, but even if they don't I'm happy.
Final thought: :)

Visit their website for more details on how it works: Unified Credit Services