Know What Is On Your Credit Report

All of our major purchases come down to one thing – our credit reports. Your credit report is like your financial report card, and it is used by potential creditors to determine how good of a financial risk you are. If you want to buy a new car or boat, your credit report is checked. If you want to buy a home, your credit report is checked. If you want a credit card, your credit report is checked.

When these potential creditors become actual creditors – by approving your credit – they still use your credit report. They report whether your payments are made on time, or if they are late. They report any collection measures that they have to take to get the money that you owe, and they even check your credit to see if they should extend you even more credit.

Credit reports contain more than just your credit history, however. They also contain information about your past employment and past addresses, any alias names you have used, and any different social security numbers that have been used with your name at the addresses you have lived at. Many people try to fool potential creditors by changing one number of their social security number – not realizing that this does not work, and it only causes future credit problems, because that information ends up on the credit report.

Unfortunately, the people that have access to your credit report are human. The people that add data to your credit report are also human – even though everything is done by computers. People operate those computers, and sometimes the data that is added isn’t correct. This can cause you to have credit nightmares, and if you aren’t keeping an eye on your credit report, you won’t even know it until you are turned down for credit.

If you are paying attention to your credit report, you can usually have errors corrected quickly and easily. Information can be retained for seven years – and bankruptcies remain on your credit report for a period of ten years. Often, the credit bureaus don’t remove credit items on the report within that time frame, and you have to write them to remove old items from your credit report.

If you have a problem getting errors corrected, you can dispute them. Even if the information is not changed – which in most cases it is if you can prove it is wrong – your ‘answer’ to the claim is added to your credit report as well. When other potential creditors look at your credit report, they will be able to see your reason for paying late, or for not paying at all.

There is another reason to keep an eye on your credit report. Identity theft is becoming more and more common, and someone else could be using your social security number to get employment and credit. Look for credit that isn’t yours, and look for addresses that you know you have never lived at or used for credit purposes. Also look for jobs that you never had in the employment section. Errors such as this are a good indication that your identity has been stolen, and it will take more than a couple of phone calls to track it down, stop it, and clean up the mess that it has created. The longer the identity theft occurs, the harder it will be to clean up, so the first time something appears on your credit report that isn’t yours, you need to alert the credit bureaus, the company that is reporting the credit, the police, the Social Security Administration, and even the Internal Revenue Service.

Jason Petrina is the Editor and Publisher of Article Click. For more FREE articles for your ezine and websites visit - www.articleclick.com

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