There is no doubt that your credit report contains a lot of information that can have a direct impact on your lifestyle. It is also true that other people are reviewing your credit file and making judgments about you and your ability to repay. What do they see? Should you be at all concerned about the information is included in your credit report? You should be very concerned with the information included in your credit report because it has a direct impact on your life. The information on your credit report can break you or make you and it does not go away overnight.

Regularly reviewing your credit report is not only a great way to keep tabs on how well you are doing financially; it is also a great way to protect yourself from identity theft and credit reporting errors. Did you know that 25% of credit reports contain errors that are serious enough to cause a denial of credit? Keep in mind that these are just the serious errors. More than three quarters of credit reports contain errors due to typing mistakes, misinformation and human error.

Credit reporting agencies know that their system is not fool proof, so they have set in place avenues that people can use to have incorrect information removed from their credit report. But you can not have information removed if you do not know it is there in the first place.

Most financial advisers recommend that you should review your credit report every 90 days or four times per year. You are entitled to one free credit report from each of the three major reporting bureaus, Experian, Equifax and TransUnion, each year. So, that is three out of four, right? Not exactly.

You see not all lenders report to all agencies. This means that your report from Experian could look completely different from a report issued by Equifax. One report might contain errors while the other is spot on. The only way to know for sure is to pull all three reports and compare them at the same time. This should be done every 90 days.

If you absolutely cannot afford to purchase reports from the agencies three times a year, you can stagger your free credit reports throughout the year. Keep in mind, though, that you may not be seeing the whole picture.

How much do credit reports cost? Depending on the bureau, you can be charged up to $10.50 for your credit report. So you are looking at roughly $90 a year to keep tabs on your credit. Remember; these fees do not include your credit score. You will also NOT be supplied a credit score along with your free reports. If you want to know your credit score, you can request it but it will cost you about $5 to $7.

Ninety dollars a year may sound steep, but not knowing could be costing you much more. You could be overpaying thousands of dollars in interest payments each year because of something on your credit report that you do not know about.

Keeping tabs on your credit report is extremely important, as is monitoring your credit score. There are many different reasons to check your credit report frequently. Often times there are mistakes on credit reports that can hurt your credit, and need to be fixed immediately. Aside from that, the only way to catch identity theft early is to monitor your credit report for fraudulent activity. There are many reasons why it is a good idea to check your credit score, but here are the top five reasons to check your credit report.

#1: Catch Mistakes

Some estimates say that as many as one in four credit reports have mistakes on them. That’s disturbing for a report that has so much effect on your every day life. Mistakes can range from having accounts listed as open that are closed (or vice versa), to having someone else’s accounts on your report. You want to make sure your credit report only reflects your credit history.

#2: Detect Fraud and/or Identity Theft

This is a huge one. Monitoring your report for charges you haven’t made or accounts you don’t have is how you will catch an identity thief red handed. The damage that can be done to you financially, credit-wise, and emotionally from identity theft is incredible, so you will want to uncover it as quickly as possible.

Identity thieves not only charge thousands of dollars to your name, but this can result in collections being sicked on you, and your credit score can take a beating even if you weren’t responsible for the fraudulent charges in question.

#3: See Who’s Snooping Around

Your credit report keeps track of inquiries about your credit history. This means that whenever people are looking into your credit history, checking up on your credit report can help you see who’s looking around. Not only is this good for you to confirm the banks, credit card companies, or land lords who are checking out your credit history, but this also allows you to look and see if there are people checking on your credit score whom you don’t know, or who shouldn’t be. This is important because it not only tells you about your credit score, but it also tells you who else has that information.

#4: Track Payments

If you’re paying bills consistently, that should help your credit score more than anything. Your credit report keeps track of payment history, and so you should be able to check and confirm that all your payments are going through in a timely manner. If anything appears off, this will also allow you to identify and fix the problem immediately.

#5: Knowing Your Credit Position

Want a new car? A new house? Your credit report will let you know what kind of loans and credit you will be able to expect. A great credit score means that you have an excellent chance of getting more credit on the best terms. A lousy credit score is going to make it difficult to get anything.

These are five of the main reasons why you should consistently check your credit score. With 79% of credit reports containing errors, chances are yours does too.

A frequent concern of individuals is “how long will a negative listing remain on my credit report?” The answer is seven years. With a bankruptcy or judgment it can stay on your report for up to ten years.

Most people feel like this is an undeserved prison sentence they have been given. During this time they can not move into a house or purchase a new car at a reasonable interest rate.

Why seven years?

Should a single slip-up deserve a seven year punishment? Should you have to live with a bad credit report for being out of work for a few months, even when we caught up on our bills soon after?

Is there something magical or statistically relevant about seven years that will make somebody all of a sudden credit worthy again? Did financial experts perform complicated tests and discover that a person needs seven years for credit rehabilitation?

Of course not, there is no good reason whatsoever for the seven year reporting law. It is a completely arbitrary time limit.

The Fair Credit Reporting Act was passed by congress in 1970. This piece of legislation established the reporting time limit. Before the Fair Credit Reporting Act a negative notation stayed on your credit report forever.

Finally, Congress placed a time limit on the bureaus. Please do not be confused that seven years is how long an item must remain on your credit. Seven years is the reporting maximum.

In other words, it is illegal for a credit bureau to report bad credit for more than seven years. Of course, there are many occasions where people rid themselves of negative items long before seven years.

Creditors and collection agencies are not required to report a listing. This is completely voluntary on behalf of the creditors and collection agencies. Furthermore creditors and collection agencies have often removed negative marks before the seven year limit.

Creditors and collection agencies usually just need a little encouragement from a compelling dispute letter or a good credit repair attorney. Plus, the credit bureaus perform credit repair on your report at the seven year mark.

In a perfect credit world negative marks would remain on a credit report forever. So long as they accurately reflected the credit worthiness of the applicant. Instead our credit reports are an excuse for creditors to assign outrageous interest rates and down payments.

The point is since we don’t live in that world, why should we wait to repair our credit? Why shouldn’t we take steps today to erase questionable and misleading information from our credit report? This way we don’t have to pay the high cost of bad credit longer than we have to?

To learn more about online credit repair or lexington law or for a free custom credit repair letter to dispute negative marks visit us.

A credit report is a history of your payments, not just a snapshot of where you are at the moment, says Maxine Sweet, vice president of public affairs for Experian, one of the three major credit reporting agencies.

A credit report is a crucial document that reflects your credit status. A credit report is a summary of your financial reliability for the most part, your history of paying debts and other bills. A credit report is a profile of your financial life that’s compiled by a credit reporting agency or credit bureau. A credit report is used by a lender to help determine whether a person qualifies for a particular credit card, loan, or service.

A credit score is like the numerical version of your credit report. Credit scoring is the process of using a proprietary mathematical algorithm to create a numerical value that describes an applicants overall creditworthiness. Credit score determines credit worthiness and with high credit worthiness borrowing capabilities increase.

Credit scores typically range from about 300 to 850. Scores above 700 are a sign of financial health and can earn you relatively low prime interest rates and favourable lending terms. Scores above 700 generally are considered to be good credit scores and scores above 775 are considered excellent by most lenders.

You can think of a high credit score as a merit badge, if you will. You will be able to obtain more credit much more easily and creditors and lenders will feel much more comfortable loaning you money, as you have obviously been a reliable borrower in the past. While you can obtain a free copy of your credit report each year, you will need to purchase your credit score.

With the adoption of risk-based pricing on almost all lending in the financial services industry, this report has become even more important since it is usually the sole element used to choose the annual percentage rate (APR), grace period and other contractual obligations of the credit card or loan.

Reports may contain information on accounts that have been long closed or paid off. A lender may perceive many inquiries over a short period of time on a person’s report as a signal that the person is in financial difficulty and is looking for loans and will possibly consider that person a poor credit risk.

When creditors report an excessive number of late payments, or trouble with collecting payments, the score suffers. Derogatory information can generally remain on your credit report for up to seven years, except for bankruptcy information, which may be reported for 10 years. Note that it is not the credit reporting agencies that decide whether a credit history is adverse, but depends on the individual lender.

What is not in my credit report? Your credit report typically does not contain information about your checking and savings account balances, brokerage accounts, medical history, race, sex, religion, national origin, or your driving record nor in most cases will it contain details of your rental agreement if you live in a tenanted property.

Building or re-building a credit report that has become bad does not have a quick-fix situation. The first step to improving and repairing a credit report is to ask for help. The only thing that can fix a credit report is time and a positive payment history.

A good debt management or credit repair company can show you the correct techniques to bring your finances under control. Once you have rebuilt your reputation your credit score will grow and you will find credit at good terms and interest rates much easier to come by.