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.