Online Personal Credit Reports |
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Your personal credit report is one of the keys to your financial standing. It can affect your ability to get a new home, rent an apartment, secure adequate insurance for your home or car, or even get a decent job. A credit report can be a useful tool or a severe hindrance to a person or family in today's dynamic marketplace. A credit report contains personal items about you that are used by credit granting companies, insurers, and even potential employers to determine the suitability of applicants to get and hold credit and other important things. Credit reports are made and held primarily by the big three credit reporting agencies, although there are other, smaller agencies. The Big Three are Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax. Each maintains a score called a FICO (Fair, Isaac) score. This score is slightly different with each reporting agencies, as they each weight the constituent parts of the score differently. In general, your score with each will be in the same range so the differences in each credit report tend to be immaterial. It's a good practice to get and maintain current knowledge of your personal credit report and FICO score, so that you will be able to head off any problems due to incorrect or derogatory information in the report. A strong credit rating, based on positive information in your credit file, is one of your best financial tools. It is now possible to secure a copy of your personal credit report from any of the big three fairly quickly online. You have to email the company or sign in on a secure server, and verify your credentials as to who you are. Once that is done, you can usually get a free personal credit report once a year. You can get them more often if you are willing to pay some nominal fee, or join a service that includes it. Once you have secured a copy of your personal credit report, you should review it carefully for errors and for derogatory information. Any errors should be reported to the credit reporting agency immediately. They will let you know on the web site exactly what mechanism to use for this statement. Any correct derogatory information should also be corrected as soon as possible, but this will probably take longer, as you may have to set up a payment plan with a creditor, or work with them to get the derogatory information removed. The work involved is well invested though, as it can lead to the strengthening of your credit status. While looking for ways to get hold of your personal credit report online, you should beware of certain companies that use less desirable tactics o entice people to pay them for services they either don't actually provide, or which they are ill-prepared to provide. Ensure that you are doing business with a reputable company, and remember that the Federal Trade Commission (www.FTC.gov) is authoritative in the area of credit use and granting laws in the U.S. Another illicit use of the information you might provide on a website is identity theft. Some people might set up web sites to entice consumers to enter their personal information to get a personal credit report, then sell or use that information later for unscrupulous purposes. A legitimate secure web site will have a yellow lock in the lower right hand corner, and if you click on that lock it should give the information about the Certificate provider that ensures the legitimacy of the web site. All in all, careful stewardship of your personal credit report information will be one of the best practices you can use to ensure your continued financial strength. |
