OK, so now you have your credit reports and wow -- there are an awful lot of numbers, abbreviations and terms you've never seen before. Trade lines, charge-offs, account review inquiries -- how do you read this thing?

First off, there are three major credit-reporting agencies in the United States: Experian, TransUnion and Equifax.

Everyone is entitled to a free copy of their three credit reports -- one from each of the credit reporting agencies -- annually thanks to a new federal law. For more details on how to get your free reports, check out "Get your credit reports annually."

Get all of them
"Looking at one is a useless endeavor; you need to look at all three," says Howard Dvorkin, president of Consolidated Credit Counseling Services in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. "People tend to pull one and think everything is the same on all of them. That's not normally the case."

The reports will have different information because it's a voluntary system, and creditors subscribe to whichever agency they want -- if any at all.

Maxine Sweet, vice president of consumer affairs at Experian, stresses the importance of ordering the report directly from the credit bureau instead of asking a buddy who works at a bank to pull one for you. Those are written for people who work in the credit industry. The one you get from the credit bureau is designed for consumers.

"The information is the same, but it's much more consumer friendly," she says.

Well, not quite the same. But the differences, Sweet says, are only to make the report easier for consumers to read. The report sent to a lender will list the credit bureau member numbers of your creditors and it won't have the complete list of every company that's pulled your credit information for promotional purposes, like pre-approved credit card offers.

"If you compared the two reports side by side, the consumer one will have a couple more pages of information," says John Ulzheimer, business development manager for myfico.com, the Web site of the Fair Isaac Corporation. The Fair Isaac Corporation is the creator of the FICO score, the widely-known credit scoring model that is used to determine a person's credit risk.

Understanding the setup
A credit report is basically divided into four sections: identifying information, credit history, public records and inquiries.

Identifying information is just that -- information to identify you. Look at it closely to make sure it's accurate. It's not unusual, Sweet says, for there to be two or three spellings of your name or more than one Social Security number. That's usually because someone reported the information that way. The variations will stay on your credit report; "If it's reported wrong, we leave it because it might mess up the link. Don't be concerned about variations."

Other information might include your current and previous addresses, your date of birth, telephone numbers, driver license numbers, your employer and your spouse's name.

The next section is your credit history. Sometimes, the individual accounts are called trade lines.

Each account will include the name of the creditor and the account number, which may be scrambled for security purposes. You may have more than one account from a creditor. Many creditors have more than one kind of account, or if you move, they transfer your account to a new location and assign a new number. The entry will also include: