How To Clean Up Your Credit File
How to clean up credit report data is a hot topic. However, credit clean up strategies aren’t sought after by just people with poor credit or people with credit score impacting things like past defaults and tax leins listed on their credit file. Rather, how to clean up credit report data is something everyone should know the basics of. More than two in every ten people after all, are refused credit on the basis of errors on their credit file. Worse, because many people don’t check their credit report until immediately prior to things like significant hire purchases, such errors often don’t come to light until hard inquiries have already dented people’s credit even further.
How To Clean Up Credit
When you are wondering how best to clean up your credit report, it’s important to start with small, logical steps. Firstly your credit clean up is going to require you to pull your own credit file, which under federal law you are entitled to do so once a year for free from each of the three main credit reporting agencies. Get your credit clean up off to a flying start by therefore visiting AnnualCreditReport.com and getting your hands on your own free copy.
Next set about checking all your personal information. The simplest way to clean up credit report files is by checking basic things like the accuracy of your name, address, social security number and current active accounts details. More importantly then, make sure that all of the accounts listed on your credit report are actually your own. If you see an account which you do not recognize inquire about this and make sure that it is simply a secondary branch of a company who you do have a relationship with and not a sign that someone is fraudulently using your identity.
The No.1 Credit Clean Up Errors To Look Out For
The biggest thing to watch out for though is account data which is definitely not your own. Mistakes do happen and this can be removed, however, for that to happen such data has to be identified in the first place. The most common thing which you will likely come across in your credit clean up though, is data which should have fallen off your credit report already. Typically, late payments and defaults are listed on credit files for 7 years. If therefore you see any 7 years or even older less complimentary entries on your file, make a not of each one an raise these with each of the big three credit bureaus.