Find Out How To Get A Great Credit Score
By Jon Arnold
There are three major bureaus (Equifax, TransUnion, and Experian) that maintain records about you that reflect your financial history. Think about that for a moment they are maintaining records on millions of people, where each person has and has had multiple experiences in the past. All of this adds up to billions of records that they need to keep straight. And it gets worse some lenders report only to one bureau, some report to two of them, and some (like your mortgage company for example) report to all three of them.
Over the years, they change due to better pricing from one versus another. All of this adds up to the fact that while most consumers do not know it, but your report almost certainly contains errors. The even worse part is that if YOU do not initiate action to get those errors corrected, the errors remain on your file, year after year.
All of this data adds up to create a score or rating for you, which is a number that reflects your ability or willingness to repay a loan, whether that is a mortgage, a car loan, a department store card, your Visa card, etc. So how does that affect you? Because the higher and better your score, the more favorable of a risk you are to the lender.
For example, I personally know some people who had errors in their report but did not worry about it for a long time. They were paying more than 8% for their mortgage loan. They decided to work on their score and discovered several errors in their report, which they got corrected. After doing that, they refinanced their mortgage and were approved for a loan just over 5%. This single account will save them several thousand dollars.
Many people want the easy way out, so they pay fees for a repair service. This is not necessary and you are throwing money out the window. A repair service will not do anything that you cannot do yourself, but you need to be motivated to
follow up on the various requests that you will be sending in. You see, you can dispute negative information that appears on your report, even if it is accurate. If it is not accurate, your job is easier because the bureau must remove the negative information if it cannot be proved. But even for negative information that is accurate, perhaps a loan from your past, the original lender may not be in a position to verify that data, and if it cannot be proven after you have disputed it, it needs to be removed from your report.
Get a copy of your report from all three agencies and then start going over that information and understand what it is saying. Look for things that would put you in a bad light if you were looking to approve or deny a loan request. When you find something, go through the procedure to dispute it, which will raise your score.
Jon is a computer engineer who maintains web sites on a variety of topics based on his knowledge and experience. You can read more about Improving Your Score at his web site Raise Your Score For A Better Rating.
