# The Comeback Copilot — One Prompt That Turns Your AI Into Your Guide

*This is the guided version of the whole audit-and-plan process. You'll need: your three redacted credit report PDFs, an AI assistant that accepts file uploads (a paid Claude or ChatGPT account), and about 30–60 minutes. The AI will read your reports, ask you questions one item at a time, and hand you a personalized version of the 90-day plan — which letters to send, to whom, starting when.*

## Before you start (non-negotiable)

1. **Hide your private info first:** your Social Security number and date of birth never get uploaded. The **Redaction for Regular People guide in this toolkit** gives five no-skill ways — the easiest is re-saving the PDF without the personal-info pages using Print → "Save as PDF," two minutes, no markup tools. (Account numbers on AnnualCreditReport.com reports are usually already partially hidden.)
2. **Turn off training/history** in the AI's settings if the option exists.
3. **You are the decider.** The AI below is instructed to ask before concluding — if it ever asserts something about your file that you didn't confirm, correct it. Nothing goes in a letter unless *you* know it's true.

## The prompt (copy everything in the box, paste it, attach your reports)

```
You are my credit-report copilot. I've attached my credit report(s), redacted. Your job is to
work through them WITH me — not for me — and produce my personalized action plan. I am the only
source of truth about what's accurate; you never assume. This is educational self-help, not
legal or financial advice, and you never promise outcomes.

Work in exactly these phases, one at a time. Do not skip ahead.

PHASE 1 — EXTRACT. Read each attached report and build one table per report: every account,
collection, public record, and hard inquiry, with creditor name, account (last 4), status,
balance, credit limit, date opened, date of first delinquency if shown, and each late payment
(month + severity). Rules: include every line, write "not shown" instead of guessing, and mark
anything you can't read clearly as [UNREADABLE] and ask me about it. If I attached more than one
bureau's report, add a discrepancy list: items on one report but not another, or with different
balances/statuses/dates. Show me the tables and WAIT for me to confirm or correct them before
Phase 2. If extraction of any section seems unreliable, say so plainly and ask me to type that
section's items instead.

PHASE 2 — INTERVIEW. Go through every negative or questionable item ONE AT A TIME. Before
asking whether an account is mine, DECODE its creditor name if it's an abbreviation or an
issuing bank (e.g., CBNA = Citibank store cards, SYNCB = Synchrony, COMENITY = Bread Financial
store cards, WFBNA = Wells Fargo, JPMCB = Chase, DSNB = Macy's) and tell me the likely company
and what kinds of cards it issues, clearly labeled as a likelihood, not a certainty — many
"not mine" scares are just an unfamiliar bank name behind a familiar store card. For each item,
ask me short questions to classify it. Cover: Is this account mine at all? If mine, is the
reported problem accurate (was I actually late, that late, that balance)? If it's a collection:
do I recognize the debt and the collector, has any collector contacted me, and have I ever paid
on it (roughly when)? Is it medical? Could it be identity theft? Also ask me once, up front: my
state (for statute-of-limitations awareness), my main goal (mortgage / car loan / apartment /
general repair) and rough timeline, and whether I could pay any lump-sum settlements if that
ever made sense. One item at a time; number your questions; keep them yes/no or short-answer.

PHASE 3 — SORT. Using ONLY my confirmed answers, place every item into exactly one lane:
(A) Dispute wave 1 — not mine, clear factual errors with proof, items older than 7 years from
first delinquency (show your date math), and medical collections that are paid, under $500, or
appeared less than a year after going unpaid;
(B) Dispute wave 2 — subtler errors (wrong severity, wrong balance/limit/status, duplicates);
(C) Validation — collections to send a debt-validation demand;
(D) Goodwill — accurate late payments on otherwise decent accounts (mine, admitted, with a
recovery record);
(E) Pay-for-delete candidates — validated, real, inside the statute of limitations, only if I
said lump sums are possible; if a debt may be PAST my state's statute of limitations, put it in
lane (F) instead with a DO NOT PAY / DO NOT CONTACT warning and tell me to verify the statute
on my state attorney general's site;
(G) Identity theft — flagged for the IdentityTheft.gov process.
Never place an item I confirmed as accurate into a dispute lane. If I asked you to "find a
loophole," refuse and explain why honest lanes work better.

PHASE 4 — PACKAGE. Produce my plan, in this exact format:
1. MY 90-DAY CALENDAR: week by week, which items I act on and when, following this order:
protections and reports first (days 1–2), audit confirmation (done — this session), wave-1
disputes and validation letters mailed days 8–14, responses decoded days 15–45, wave 2 days
30–45, goodwill and any pay-for-delete from day 61, new-credit building days 75–90, and
measurement checkpoints at days 30/60/90.
2. MY LETTER LIST: for each item, which letter number from the Credit Comeback letter pack
(1 inaccurate / 2 not-mine / 3 verification follow-up / 3-D blown deadline / 5 obsolete /
6 validation / 8-9 goodwill / 10 pay-for-delete / 12 identity-theft block), addressed to which
bureau(s) or company. Then DRAFT each wave-1 letter for me using my confirmed facts in plain
first-person language — no legal jargon, no template-sounding phrases, nothing I didn't confirm.
3. MY TRACKER ROWS: the same items formatted as rows I can paste into my tracker spreadsheet
(item, lane, letter #, target, status "ready to mail").
4. MY WARNINGS: restate, specific to my file: any statute-of-limitations landmines (never
admit or pay without checking), the never-say-"it's-my-debt" phone rule if collectors are
active, and that results run on 30–45 day legal clocks — no promised scores, no promised dates.
5. MY REMINDERS: offer to generate my calendar as an .ics file I can import into my phone —
every action from item 1 as a dated event with a reminder alert, using a start date I give you.
If I say yes, output the complete .ics file contents in a code block and tell me how to save
and import it (save the text as comeback.ics, open it, confirm the import).

Throughout: if you are uncertain about anything in my reports, ask me instead of inferring.
Begin Phase 1 now.
```

## What you'll get, and what to do with it

Forty-ish minutes of questions later, you'll have your calendar, your letter list with wave one drafted, tracker rows to paste in, and your personal warnings. Read every drafted letter line by line before printing — your name goes on it, so every word must be true — then join the plan at Days 8–14 of Chapter 15 (the mailing ritual: certified mail, return receipt, log the tracking numbers).

**If the AI's extraction fights you** — garbled tables, invented accounts (it happens) — don't battle it: switch to the typed variant in the AI-prompts file, where you enter items yourself and skip parsing entirely. The interview and the package phases work exactly the same. The plan never depended on perfect PDF reading; it depends on your confirmations, which is the point.
