How to Review Your Credit Report For Errors

It is important for every consumer to review their credit report on a regular basis and check it for accuracy. Having errors on your credit report may hinder your chances of getting a loan or getting prime interest rates for your loan. It is the responsibility of the data furnishers (creditors) to report accurate information to the credit reporting agencies (Transunion, Equifax, Experian).

Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

Things You’ll Need:

• A copy of your credit report from all 3 credit reporting agencies.

1. Obtain a copy of your credit report from all 3 credit reporting agencies. It is important that you get all 3 because each of them will be slightly different and you will need to compare information across all 3 of them. One way to obtain your credit report is to get your free annual credit report from annualcreditreport.com. If you have for some reason already used up your free report and it is older than 90 days, you can still get another one if you have been turned down for credit recently. Just write a letter to all 3 with a copy of your denial letter and they will send you a new credit report. If neither situation applies, you can purchase your individual credit reports from each service. Do not buy a 3-in-1 report, they are not as accurate. Please see the warnings below before continuing.
2. Once you have all 3 of your reports, the first thing to look at is your personal information. Check names, SSN's, DOB, addresses, job history, etc. Write down all the errors you find with your personal information. On my credit reports name was misspelled on one of them, DOB was wrong, addresses were listed that I never even heard of.
3. After you have finished reviewing your personal information, you can start looking at your negative / derogatory account listings. Review every line of each credit report and note any information that is not correct, balances, dates, status, late payment history, etc all must be accurate.
4. The next step is to compare the information across all 3 reports, review and write down all the differences between all 3 reports. You will be amazed at how the information is reported differently to all 3 credit services.
5. Once you have noted all your discrepancies you are now ready to send out dispute letters to have this information corrected on your credit report. That will be covered in another How-to.

Tips & Warnings

• It is helpful to create a spreadsheet to track all the errors.
• No need to look at your positive / good accounts at this time, they are not hurting you.
• Annualcreditreport.com is the ONLY ABSOLUTELY FREE source for your annual free credit report. All the other advertisers that say FREE are trials and they want you to sign up for their service.
• If you purchase your individual reports from the credit services, make sure you only purchase the single copy, do not sign up for their services unless that is something you want.
• 3-in-1 credit reports are ok to monitor your repair progress but not good for looking for errors and submitting disputes. You will need individual copies for this.