Having your credit report does not do much good if you don’t know how to read it. We have put together an overview on how to read a credit report, explaining in easy to understand, straight forward language how to read a credit report.
Credit reports have four basic areas as follows:
Personal information – this includes your name, home address, Social Security number, birth date, and who your employer is.
Credit payment history – this covers your payment history for credit cards, mortgages, installment loans, student loans and any other revolving debt you may carry or have carried in the past. In addition, this is going to include information on collections and charge offs.
Public records – this section gives information on any bankruptcies you may have had (chapter 7, 11 and/or 13), any tax liens, any judgments and other liens.
Recent credit inquiries – this tells you who pulled your credit information and when they pulled it.
The best credit report to obtain is called a trimerge credit report. This gives you information from all three of the credit reporting bureaus. These bureaus are Equifax, Transunion and Experian. It is important to view a trimerge credit report because not all debts are reported to all three credit bureaus. It is particularly important if you are checking for errors, as one bureau may have an error, while the other two may be correct.
In addition to three different bureaus, there are numerous groups that facilitate credit pulls, and each one lays their report out a little bit differently. Although they do have different layouts, if you know what you are looking at you should be able to read any credit report, regardless of the layout.
The important parts of your credit report will be easy to find, and if you have a good idea of what it is you are looking at, you will be able to quickly scan your trimerge credit report to find the information you are looking for.
Since learning how to read a credit report can be a very in depth discussion, especially if you do not read credit reports during your daily course of business, we are going to break down how to read a credit report section into sections. To get started learning how to read a credit report, make your way through these posts. By the end of this short series, you should have a very good handle on how to read a credit report:
Understanding your credit report
Sample credit report
