Ordering and Understanding Your Free Credit Report
Posted by admin under: Main Feb 16A credit report is a record of your personal credit history. Creditors turn to your credit file when first deciding whether or not to grant you credit.
A credit report does not contain any information on your race, religion or political preferences, but it does have information on:
- Your Personal Identifiers: your legal name, present and past addresses, present and past employers and your social security number.
- Current and Past Credit Accounts: this section includes all your present credit accounts including credit limits, balances and payment histories. Late payments, repossessions and charge-offs are recorded here.
- Public Record Information: Here they record any tax liens, bankruptcies and legal judgements against you.
- Credit Inquiries: Information regarding businesses that have requested your credit file within the last 12 months.
It’s important to periodically review your credit file as more than half the credit reports contain some errors, according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC.gov)
There may be some confusions or misspellings of your name: perhaps you entered Bob Jones on an application and Robert Jones on another, or negative credit information from a different Bob Jones is recorded on your credit file,…
Often, there can be errors from the credit bureaus themselves: the credit info is transmitted to the 3 major credit bureaus by tapes or written reports, and a simple typographical error may inadvertently add negative information to your file.
Creditor error happens when the reporting company mistakenly sends the wrong information about you.
Finally, since the major credit bureaus are competitors, they do not sharre information. So positive information may be reported to Equifax and Experian, but is absent from your credit file at Transunion.
For these reasons, it’s important to check your free credit report before any major purchase or at least annually to report any mistakes.
Ordering your Free Credit Report is easy. The Federal Trade and Accurate Credit Transactions Act (FACT) of 2003 allows you to obtain a free annual credit report from the 3 major credit bureaus once a year at no charge.
You are also entitled to a free credit report if:
- You have been denied credit, insurance or employment in the last 60 days and the denial was a result of information contained in your credit report.
- You are on welfare.
- You are or you suspect being a victim of credit fraud or Identity theft.
Additional information on ordering and understanding your credit report is available at
www.FreeCreditReportSite.Org
If you’d like to order your free annual credit report, you can do so at http://www.freecreditreportsite.org
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Source: Ordering and Understanding Your Free Credit Report
Saturday, February 16th, 2008 at 6:26 am and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.