December 29,2008
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Make 2009 Your Year of Stout Credit, Pt.3 –
– Obtain free credit reports.The first steps to ensure success involve commitment and effort. The most likely fixes involve errors and inaccuracies. Even this simplest of activities can be grueling if you let it. Be sure and note names, phone numbers, associations and functional titles of the people you speak with. Otherwise you're likely to spend three weeks trying to track down a high-level department head only to find the first person you spoke with was the one to help you but just wasn't in the mood the day you called. Where credit cards are concerned, you may find that some ‘derogitories' aren't applicable and won't effect your FICO score. You may need to pay the small fee exacted by a bureau to look closer at your actual score. This service also includes expert advice as to the worst problems and the best way to meaningfully raise your FICO (credit card) score. This can save you some time and may be worth it. New federal legislation has just come out prohibiting certain categories from affecting others in the credit card industry.
Begin by reviewing one of your three existing credit reports. The choices are: TransUnion, Experian or Equifax. Federal law provides you with one each year from each of these bureaus. You can request or download them from Annualcreditreport.com (credit scores are not free, however). It's best to space report requests out, however, so you can allow your work to progress and gage the results over time. Of course, you can tackle all three at once administratively but, consider that sometimes a fix at one bureau will carry into another bureau automatically and save you the trouble of duplication. Also, after you've received one report from each agency, you'll have to pay for any more until a year passes. (There are exceptions to this however, like being turned down or cancelled from a loan, loss of job with commitment to search for a new one over the next 60 days, going on welfare, becoming a fraud victim, being denied a new credit card approval or having existing credit card accounts closed without your permission.