Check Credit Score

It is important that you check your credit report for errors and accuracy. I work as a mortgage loan consultant and see errors and surprises on applicants credit reports all the time.

Unfortunately, people wait until they have already found their dream home and fallen in love with it before they apply for their home loan and the mortgage company retrieves their credit report and scores.

Even if you know that you have no late payments or other bad credit habits, your credit score may not be good because of posting errors to your file.

I had a young man apply for a mortgage who was not worried at all about his credit because he knew he had always managed his money well and made all his payments on time. When his credit report was retrieved their were several collections and a judgment showing on his credit history. And, as a result his credit scores were too low to qualify for his new home loan.

As it turned out he was a Jr. and the bad credit was his father's debt. Because the name was the same and the creditors had not all reported the Jr. or Sr. in the name the items were posted to the wrong file.

And, it is not just a simple matter of picking up the phone and calling the credit bureaus and saying those items are not mine. You must write a dispute letter and send proof that you are not the person to which these credit items belong. Then the credit bureau will send a letter to the creditor to confirm this information and the creditor has 30 days to respond to the dispute.

A number of people that I have worked with before will find that they have a judgment on their credit report that they were unaware of. Often times this person has moved and never received the notification about the judgment being filed against them.

If you have a common name then it does not have to be a Jr./Sr. type situation for someone else's credit to appear on your credit report. If the other person has good credit then it might not be a bad thing that the error has occurred. But, if the item is a collection or just an item with late payments then you really want to get this cleared up before you need your credit rating for a purchase.

Tri Merge Credit Report

When checking your credit it is important to get what is called a Tri Merge Credit Report. This will give you your credit history will all three credit bureaus (Experian, Equifax, TransUnion).

This is important because all creditors do not report credit activity to all three of the credit bureaus. They may only report to one.

If you only get your credit report from one of the credit reporting agencies then you may miss items that are being reported to one of the other agencies.

Whats My Credit Score

You not only want a copy of your credit report, you want to be sure that you are also going to receive your credit score. Each credit reporting agency has its own scoring model. This plus the fact that all your credit items may not be available to each bureau to be used in the scoring process will cause you to have a different score with Equifax, Experian and TransUnion.

If you are apply for a new home loan then the mortgage company will use the middle of these three scores to determine if you will be approved for a mortgage.

How To Improve Credit Scores

If after you have reviewed your credit history and you find that you need to raise your credit scores, but you don't know how, then visit How To Fix Credit to get some help on what you need to do to get your credit scores back into the good range.

If you chose to work on your credit scores then you might want to sign up with one of the credit monitoring services in order to keep a check on how your efforts are impacting your scores.

Check Credit Score

If you don't know how to go about getting a free copy of your credit report and check your credit history and scores then visit Check Credit Score. You can learn whats a good credit score, all about tri merge credit reports and all other credit score information that you need to know.