Learning About Your Credit Reports
Credit reports have been around almost as long as credit cards. They do have some good points, and they certainly have some bad. They are notorious for making mistakes and for years, until laws changed, they were impossible to deal with as we tried to get errors corrected.
Our world revolves around having excellent credit. Some jobs demand that we have excellent credit and our reports are checked before we are hired. And of course, anyone who is considering lending us money for a mortgage or a car loan, or even a new store credit card – will base his decision entirely on what is found in our credit history. If there’s a lot of negative information, kiss that loan goodbye! The problem is that, all too frequently, the negative information is just plain wrong.
One of the major problems with these reports is that when a company wants to check your credit, they have a choice of three major credit bureaus. These bureaus rarely have the same information across the board. One might have your car loan as paid up satisfactorily, and another might say you are a month behind on payments. Still the third one might not even have a record of your car loan because the lender uses one of the other credit bureaus exclusively.
Over the past ten years or so, various types of legislation has been enacted to protect consumers. Credit histories can be viewed online immediately, which is a wonderful improvement over the old method of writing a letter and waiting weeks for the report to be mailed back. These reports were free only if you were denied credit. It seemed as if you had no reason or right to see your report for any other reason!
An issue that doesn’t seem to be an easy to get around is the fact that there are three major reporting bureaus, but there are no regulations that demand these bureaus compare notes to see who has what information. What happens? You could be turned down for credit because one of these agencies has information – with errors perhaps – that the others don’t. If your lender for some reason only uses that particular agency, you’re in trouble.
Years ago a consumer could only have a free copy of his credit history if he was denied credit. He would need to write a letter and then wait sometimes weeks before hearing back. Then he would need to review it and if there were errors, which was and still is all too common, he would need to write further letters and wait more time to try to get these problems fixed. It could easily take a year to have issues addressed.
Anything you don’t agree with can be added to your report. The problem is that they don’t give you much space to do this, so your information may not have much weight.
If you have bad credit, it’s not easy. If you need to clean up your credit, you have to have good credit. Get some credit repair and get fix your credit worries. Learn how now!
categories: credit report,credit score,bad credit,fix credit,money,finance
