A credit score can be critical to your personal finances. It determines whether you will get a loan, and the interest rates on the loans you get. It may be the difference between finding a nice house to rent, and applying fruitlessly again and again without success. Still, few people understand credit scores and what goes into them, and still fewer know how they can affect them.
A smart individual works as hard as he can to ensure that heas got a good credit rating. But you may wonder, is my credit controlled by anyone other than me? Unfortunately, it can be. But donat worry, because there are steps you can take to erase othersa black marks from your credit score.
Credit bureaus keep a lot of information on file, and this information is summarized as a number. This number is a credit score. The most commonly used one, the FICO score, is the sum of three such scores from three different credit bureaus. To find out what your FICO score is, you can use the myfico service.
Credit scores are continuously fluctuating to reflect changes in your account and credit activity. The total amount of debt that you have, the types of debts youave incurred, and your history of paying on time factors into your credit. The amount of time that you have had access to lines of credit also is considered by credit bureaus.
Payment history is the biggest factor that affects credit, and one of the ways that others can affect your credit score is if companies wrongly reports you as an unreliable bill payer. This does happen more than you would think, and it may be a battle to get the incorrect information changed.
Anyone whoas had a problem like this can attest to the fact that an incorrect report from their employeras or utility provideras accounting department can cause them years of headaches. They have to play phone tag with companies, debt collectors, and credit bureaus. But the law is on your side, and usually these issues ultimately are worked out to the satisfaction of the customer.
Check your credit report. If your score is a lot lower than you expected, you should check if a credit bureau has incorrect information about your financial profile. Youall usually already know if they problem is misinformation about payments, but the incorrect information could be coming from other sources and causing your score to be low.
So in summary, you arenat the sole controller of your credit score. The mistakes of others can certainly impact your credit, but the damage done is not permanent. You have recourse and you can fix your credit score when it has been lowered by other peoplesa mistakes.
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