How To Read A Credit Report

Keeping up with your credit score is one of the most important things you can do to protect your financial well being. How to read a credit report will be a vital skill you will need to develop to do this, however.

Before you can learn how to read a credit report, you will first need to know how to pull one. Consumers can pull their reports from all three agencies – Experian, TransUnion and Equifax – once every 12 months. Learning how to read a credit report will follow the process of pulling the free reports.

To get your reports and learn how to read a credit report, all you need to do is contact the three agencies and request the reports or visit the Internet and get the job done. There are sites out there that can help in pulling reports.

Once you have your reports, you can begin learning how to read a credit report. The first thing you will want to do is separate out all three reports. Learn how to read a credit report from each agency, one at a time.

It is important to pull reports directly from the reporting agencies either in writing or online because the resulting reports will be made for consumer, not lending agency, consumption. This means these reports are easier to read and will make it less complicated to learn how to read a credit report.

You will see as you learn how to read a credit report that these are broken up into four major sections. The sections are identifying information, history, public records and inquiries. As you proceed in learning how to read a credit report, check all four sections for accuracy. The identifying information section, for example, should have your name and social security number.

The next section is your history, which is very important in the process of learning how to read a credit report. Each lender in the report should have basic information about the accounts you’ve opened with them. How to read a credit report here is vital. The lender entries should include the date the account was opened, the kind of credit it is, if there is a co-borrower involved, the total limit, how much you owe, fixed payments or minimum amounts, the status of the account and whether you pay on time.

The history will be the meat of the report and as you learn how to read a credit report, it’s also important to make sure you know how to dispute anything that is inaccurate. Contact both the lender in question and the reporting agency to fix errors.

Public records will include such incidents as bankruptcy, arrests and so on. It’s best to find this section blank when you learn how to read a credit report. The inquiries relates to the hits on your credit history from potential lenders.

Learning how to read a credit report isn’t a difficult process, but it’s one that should be taken very seriously.