4 Quick Tips About Credit Reports

Your credit report generally contains a lot of information about your past financial and other activity. It can pay to know - and save you thousands of dollars over the course of your life if you know how to manage it.

Your Creditors

The most basic function of your credit report is to list your creditors over time and how you paid them.

The creditors can be mortgage lenders, credit cards, student loans, store cards, etc.

These creditors generally report this information to credit repositories where the information is gathered. The reporting is done by identifying you by your social security number.

Each credit line usually has its own account number. You can use this account number when talking to your creditors.

Credit Report Balances

For each creditor the report should generally list what the maximum possible balance is on the credit line, the current balance, and the size of the monthly payment. For a mortgage loan the maximum balance is the starting size of the loan. For a credit card the maximum balance is the credit limit.

Problems On Your Credit Report

Each report generally lists your creditors in one of three categories: current creditors, closed creditors, and delinquencies.

Each creditor will report how many times you were late by 30, 60, 90 or more days. For example, you could have been late on a credit card 2 times by 30 days. You could be late on a credit card by 60 days only 1 time.

If you are occasionally late on smaller items by only 30 days this can usually be explained as an oversight. If you are chronically late that would treated differently by the lender.

Being late on a mortgage is one of the worst things you can do for your credit report when you are applying for a new mortgage.

Creditors differ in the speed that they report your information to the credit bureaus. Some are very fast, and late payments can show up on your credit sometimes in just days.

Additional Credit Report Information

If there are problems on your credit report you should be able to use the credit report to help you.

The credit report usually contains contact information for the creditors, and the account number. You can use these to contact the creditors. Sometimes a creditor will be a name you don't recognize at all. This is usually the name of a credit collection company that now owns your bad debt. The account number on the credit report for that creditor should help you to communicate with them.

You will need to provide documentation about why something is wrong on your credit report. Closed credit lines generally start falling off your credit report after 7 years.