Thing you have to know about your credit report

Are you aware on how to go about reading your credit report? There may be some things that you ought to know regarding your credit report. Feel free to read up and you may be able to look at your credit report in a different light the next time you happen to find it lying around your desk. Here are some details that you ought to know:

You officially get 1 for free annually

This should be enough for those who are just monitoring their credit. On the other hand if you want to get a more comprehensive view of your credit report you are going to have to get your other credit report and this may actually cost you.

There are 3 reporting agencies

There are 3 agencies wherein you can request for your free credit report. You have TransUnion, Equifax and Experian. I actually do not know the reason why there are 3 instead of just one for easier consolidation. However some companies do not really submit to all three so in order for you to get a complete view of your items, you are going to need to request from all 3.

Your free reports will not contain your scores

Do not expect your credit history will already contain your score. The free ones that you are going to get will only reflect the items that are tagged under your name. You will have to pay for a report that will contain your actual score. It is worth noting that requests or inquiries will appear on your report.

Requests/Inquiries impact

As much as possible, do not make the inquiries on your own. The reason being is that too many inquiries will have a negative effect on your credit score. So far there is no published formula that would give us the liberty to compute our own scores that is why it would be better off for us to focus on the items that we have on our report and minimize the inquiries as much as we can.

You can dispute negative items

Just in case you are not aware, you will have to categorize the items to positive and negative items. Positive items are the accounts under your name that has been maintained well. This means that there are no missed or delayed payments. Of course the negative items are the complete opposite. The negative items are the ones that will pull your scores down. Once you got the negative items identified, you can then proceed to disputing them. You can use  Dispute Fax to start the process but if you think that this is too tedious to your liking, then you can actually hire a company to do it for you.

If you need a copy of your DMV credit reports you can check out this website: http://www.dmv.com/records-reports.