December 26,2008
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Fixing Your Credit Report, Pt.3 –
– Your FICO Credit Card Rating.Your FICO credit card score will probably not be included in this freebee report. Just the raw data without the weighted calculations that rate the cumulative result. Generally, knowing your FICO score isn't essential since you can get a good idea of what to do by just reading the report. If you haven't tended to this before you'll probably immediately notice some inaccuracies. Some may be consequential and some not. The credit card industry generally places less emphasis on other types of loans than credit card activity.
The four main categories you'll find are somewhat ordered by priority:
1) Alerts.
2) Account information (especially credit card accounts, will be listed in detail here).
3) Inquiries, both ‘Hard' and ‘Soft'.
4) Personal information (this can be very extensive).After the opening summation of important issues, you'll probably start seeing the ‘derogatory' items first. Again, back to the question of consequential, you may have four or five ‘derogitories' against you for defaults of tens of thousands of dollars but find an opening statement that says "No Potentially negative credit items appear on your report". Credit card issues, however, are generally more important.
The next section will detail these categories and provide helpful tips. But one helpful tip here might be appropriate. In you're, you'll probably notice the ‘friendly suggestions along the say that tempt you to spend the money and buy that agency's rating report on you. You must decide if it's worth it. Note, however, that there are possible ways to receive FICO information without having to pay.
Consider other routes may be a better fit for you. For example, opening a WaMu credit card account comes with a very nice online management system that will tell you what your current FICO score is any time you want. The site will even analyzes your situation and makes suggestions of how you can improve your score. One of the nicest parts is the model where you can plug in your own ideas about what to do and the analyzer will spin up a result for you showing what would probably happen. There are all kinds of help descriptions about terms and how each of the various criteria are typically applied and how each can make a difference (good or bad). Very nice tools.