3 Credit Bureau Report – Free Score

Stephen Chua asked:




Each of the three major credit bureaus receive credit data from thousands of data providers each day. Each month, the number of updates to their database can run into the billions. Thus it is nearly impossible to avoid incorrect or incomplete information.

Each bureaus has their own procedure for consumers to dispute their credit report. However, in general, it can be broken down into six steps

Step 1 – Get Your Credit Report

You order your credit report from all of the credit bureaus. Review them and list down the incorrect or incomplete information.

Step 2 – Submit A Dispute Request

You submit your dispute request via email, telephone or using the online form provided by the credit bureaus.

Step 3 – Credit Bureaus Investigate

Upon receiving your request, the credit bureau will investigate your dispute by contacting the creditors involved.

Step 4 – Creditors Investigate and Respond To Credit Bureaus

The creditors will investigate to see if the dispute is valid. They will then respond to the bureaus with the results their investigation.

Step 5 – Credit Bureaus Update Their File

If the creditors confirm that disputes are valid, the credit bureaus will update their database with the correct information.

Step 6 – Credit Bureaus Notify You

Within 30 to 45 days, depending on how complex your dispute is, you will receive a notification about the result of your dispute. IF there are changes to your credit report, an updated copy will be send to you at no extra charge.

If you are disputing the records in your free annual credit report, the turnaround time will be 45 days.

For faster result, you can also contact the creditors directly to dispute the records in your credit reports. In this case, you can skip step 2 and 3. However, if you have no experience or are not confident in dealing with creditors directly, it is better to leave the job to the bureaus.

Once you receive the updated credit reports from the bureaus, make sure you examine them carefully to make sure the incorrect information has been removed. In the event the information you dispute has been re verify as correct, you can request the bureaus to show the record as disputed. If you want, you can also add a statement to explain the dispute.

As the credit reports contain vital information that affects your financial health, you should not hesitate to dispute any records that you know to be incorrect, especially if you have the evidence to prove your claim. Your credit score will likely get a significant boost once you are done fixing those inaccuracies in your credit reports.

Karl

Jon Arnold asked:




Everyone is probably aware that the big three nationwide credit bureaus (Equifax, TransUnion, and Experian) maintain credit reports on you and everyone else. That means they are responsible for maintaining accurate and up-to-date data on hundreds of millions of people. Think about that for a minute – if each person had just ten credit references sources reporting about them (and some will have many more than that), these institutions are responsible for maintaining records easily numbering into the BILLIONS of data records.

As far as credit information about you, some of them have more, some have less, and this is because any particular lender or credit reference probably only reports to one of them, maybe two of them. Very few lenders outside of lenders for big-ticket items such as a home mortgage will report to all three of them. But it is for this very reason that you need to get a copy of your credit report from each of the credit bureaus on a regular basis (multiple times annually), because the data on the report from each one will probably vary significantly.

The reason for outlining the information above is to allow you to see the logical conclusion that we are coming to. Since the credit bureaus maintain such a tremendous volume of data, errors are inevitable. Errors are almost guaranteed. And study after study has shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that while it is unfortunate, a MAJORITY of consumers have at least one error or inaccuracy on their credit report. But the fact that makes this even worse is that these errors do not get corrected or fixed automatically. Rather, the erroneous data is carried forward in your credit report, month after month and year after year.

This begs the question of how and when does this wrong information get corrected. The answer is that it does not get corrected, not unless YOU initiate the dispute with the credit bureau and insist that it get corrected. Although most consumers don’t realize this, the ball is totally and squarely in YOUR court to take action to get the information corrected that they maintain about YOU.

Let’s take a very typical example. You get copies of your credit report from all three agencies and note that two of them are reporting a 90 day $100 past due balance with Sears. What? You paid off your Sears account on time and you know for a fact that it has a zero balance. You call Sears customer service and they verify that you have a zero balance. So what do you do? You file a dispute with the two credit bureaus that have reported this inaccurate information. The credit bureaus are then required by law to verify the REAL scoop about your Sears account and have the correct data shown. But again, this does not happen unless YOU initiate the dispute. There are no automatic mechanisms that will get this corrected for you over time.

In another example, let’s say that you see an account on your credit report for a Visa card that has a huge balance. Huh? You only have two Mastercard accounts, no Visa account, and you have no idea where this came from. You could find yourself as being the victim of one of the fastest growing crimes in the world today, which is Identity Theft. Find out more about Identity Theft, what it is and what you must do if you are a victim at Identity Theft Information.

There are many such errors, and it is up to YOU to file the dispute and get the information corrected. There is a wide variety of information you can get changed, all of which will raise your credit score because of how lenders perceive your value to them, which is all derived from information in your credit report. Raising your credit score is probably the single-most important thing you can do for your finances.

My web site contains information about when and how this happens, but most importantly, what you can do about it. You are strongly encouraged to take the time today to start getting that inaccurate information corrected before it causes you a lot of grief.

Janet

David Faulkner asked:




Companies providing credit have certain criteria’s to ensure whether u will be able to pay back your loans or not. What ever sort of loan it may be, a car payment, a Visa or MasterCard or Discover or American Express, a department store credit card, a gas company credit card or a mortgage, they are all clubbed under one category and then accordingly a credit score is maintained by all the three big credit companies in United States of America. The credit score is calculated not only keeping in view the current unpaid bills but the complete account history and accordingly they analyze whether their money with you is safe or not and what more can be offered to you. So credit score does make a whole lot of a difference.

Criteria of credit score:

Most of the times a digit most probably ranging between 450 and 850 are allotted to the holder according to which your reliability is calculated by the bureau. The credit score system cannot be said to be fool proof, in fact there are some flaws in it. Some times a credit may be reflecting in more than bureau and as time passes as do the contracts and staff. Any errors that are left are untouched and remain there as it is. The credit company for the lender has changed but the defaults are still carried forward. This is not the case with Mortgage Company, that an exception, as it is reported to all the three bureaus depending upon the amount.

Credibility Of the system:

Another factor which raises eyes on the credibility of credit scores analysis system is the amount of data a credit bureau has to maintain. Such huge data can’t be errorless, not their fault. Not only they Keep track of your current status but also maintain the complete previous record. The total amount of data sums out to billions of records considering the number of businesses and customers in the country. According to studies around 10 percent of the records are corrupted, which is a lot.

No bureau can figure out the worthiness of a customer according to the credit score as the bureaus [http://www.creditscorereportguide.org/Experian_Credit_Report/] do not share their data with each other and a person being very appropriate in one case might be a defaulter with the other bureau. So the credit score is not an exact picture of your credit history but just a hypothetical thing.

What else is the option for us? All we can do it keep a close vigil on our own track record. One should not just rely on one of the bureaus and get regular statements from all the three agencies Equifax, Experian and TransUnion and check them regularly. In case of an error we must report it back and they have to either justify the thing or refund it. This process must be followed at least twice in a year so as to maintain your credit score as it does reflect how you have been in handling credits.

Lonnie