| How
to read and understand your credit report | | |
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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. The ones
at the bank 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 Fair Isaac Corporation is the creator of the FICO score, the
widely used credit scoring model that is used to determine a person's credit risk.
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's 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:
- When you
opened the account
- The kind
of credit (installment, such as a mortgage or car loan, or revolving,
such as a department store credit card)
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