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Total amount borrowed, (high) credit limit or highest balance on
card
How much outstanding is still owed
Fixed monthly payments or minimum monthly amount
Status of account (whether open, inactive, closed, paid, etc.)
How you've conducted account: On your Experian report, your payment history is written in plain English -- "pays on time", "always pays 30 days late", etc. Other comments may include "internal collection" (collections department) and "charged-off" or "in Default.
("Charged-off" means creditor has given up on collecting account and subsequently, written off debt.)
Other credit agency reports instead use Payment Codes denoting activity on account. These range 1 to 9; R1 or I1 on a credit report is indicative of a good repayment history on a revolving or instalment account.
PUBLIC RECORDS:
Hopefully, next section of your credit report will be blank. The public records section is, without doubt, bad news. If you have a public record, this indicates previous problems.
The kinds of things we're talking about here are major financial delinquencies such as bankruptcies, judgments and tax liens. These problems will ruin your credit report for sure.
INQUIRIES:
The final section is for Inquiries. This section contains a list of every creditor who has asked to see your credit report.
The thing to note about "inquiries" is that every time a creditor asks to see your credit report, this will show up as an inquiry.
From all this activity, you can begin to see why your credit file is so detailed.
Inquiries are divided into two sections:
"Hard" inquiries - are those initiated whenever you fill out credit application.
"Soft" inquiries - are those initiated by companies who pre-qualify you before sending promotional material.
You may have heard rumours that large numbers of inquiries have a negative impact on your credit score. In fact, this is not as damning as many would have you believe.
In reality, vast majority of inquiries are ignored by FICO (sounds like "psycho") scoring model.
This is because FICO model has a lead-in period that ignores all inquiries within 30 days of a mortgage or car loan approval. It also counts two or more "hard" inquiries in same 14-day period as just one inquiry.
For example, you could have 20 "hard" inquiries in two weeks and they will only count as one.
If you find any mistakes in your credit report such as an account belonging to someone else, or a disputed amount, then you should fill out dispute form that comes with report. Simply follow instructions in Explanatory Notes section.
The process of Disputing an item on your report can take some time as creditors have 30 days to respond to discrepancy by credit reporting agency. And unfortunately, as long there remains any dispute, that dispute will also show on your credit report. Established lenders state that it's common for most reports to have errors. Some estimate that as many as 80 percent of all credit reports have some kind of error.
See also: How To Fix Your Credit Report.
Credit Repair Guides Free to Fix Bad Credit Scores. This website is designed to help you find the best information about credit and credit related issues in the United States. Download our free Credit How-tos now! Copyright © 2005 Andy Ballentine and 1st-Netcard.com. All Rights Reserved. Please note: This Resource Box MUST be included with article.
