Find Out How To Raise Your Credit Score Easily
By Jon Arnold
Just a few short years ago, a law was enacted which said that you could get a copy of your history report free once per year. This was a great idea, and a lot of people took advantage of this. But still, the one thing that puzzles me is why more people are not taking advantage of this law?
At the core of things, I think the reason is that very few people realize that their reports contain inaccurate data, or more precisely, ERRORS. For the most part, this is due to the large numbers of records that the bureaus need to manage for each consumer and business entity in the US. This is further complicated when a particular lender decide to start reporting to one bureau versus another.
I mean, think about it for just a second. If you add together all consumers and all businesses in the US, then add at least one record for each loan or card account they currently have or ever have had, you arrive at an incredible number which represents BILLIONS of records. That is a system administrators nightmare but it is the job they took on. Now if only 1% of that database is in error, then that means that there are MILLIONS of records with errors, and the actual percentage shown in recent studies if more than 25% are in error!
But something that most people are not in tune with is that it is THEIR responsibility to get those errors corrected. The errors do not correct themselves, and will never get corrected if you do not initiate action to get them corrected. One of the things that compounds this problem even more is that you need to dispute that error with each of the three bureaus Equifax, Trans Union, and Experian because they do not share data between them.
Now the thing that results by having inaccurate data in your history profile in that your score is not calculated correctly. Your score, sometimes also known as a FICO score, is a number that the bureaus have come up with as a quick way to gauge your worthiness. Although your score may be higher than it should be based on these errors, chances are greater that your score is worse than it should be.
You need to get those errors and get that negative information removed. How do you do that? You start by getting yourself a copy of your report, and get a separate report
from each agency. Read through the report very carefully and note anything that is wrong or is in error. Then file a dispute letter.
After you have filed a dispute form with the bureau, they then have 30 days to either verify the information as being accurate, or deleting it from your report. The thing that makes that decision is whether or not the lender verifies the information as being accurate, or just plain does not respond. If this is an account that has been paid off for several years, even though you had some problems with the account early on, the lender may just not take the time to respond at all, in which case the data needs to be deleted.
Then there is the stuff that is REALLY wrong, and you have every right to request that your report reflect accurate information. The procedure is exactly the same file a dispute with the bureau stating the facts, and they have 30 days to either get that information verified or to remove it.
When your report is squeaky clean, your resulting score will be as high as it should be, and that is, after all, what you wanted to accomplish!
Jon is a computer engineer who maintain a variety of web sites based on his knowledge and experience. For more information about Raising Your Score, please visit his web site at Improve Your Score.
