January 16,2009
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Surviving the CC Earthquake, Pt.1 –
– Start with Credit Reporting Bureaus.In order to survive the upcoming industrial earthquake in the credit card industry, many of us will need to buttress up our credit reports. You can already feel the tremors, so we know it's coming soon. Most of us depend on our credit cards for spending liquidity just to stay afloat until we get back to work and resume getting paychecks. A large portion of the rest of us, certainly feel the concern, as the economy continues to plummet and we already have trouble keeping up with credit card debt.
We'll need to have better FICO credit card scores then we have in the past and those scores are largely derived from our credit reports. Most of us probably aren't aware of what our credit reports look like or what they say about us. Often times, we learn of inaccuracies and ‘juggling' that hurt us, after it's too late. So, the first step is to find out. Credit reports normally cost about $16 each and there are three main reporting agencies that credit card lenders draw from. That would mean a cost of $48 each time we check all three. Fortunately, the Federal Government provides for each us to get one free report from each of these reporting agencies within a 12-month period. It may be good to space them out over time in order to check results of actions you take to fix things.
One further note...there are other cases where you can actually get more than one free report from each of these agencies in the same year. These are cases like when you're denied a new credit card account or when one of your current credit card is closed because of a credit report issue. There are other reasons, too. These are cases like: within 60 days of losing your job; being turned down from a job; falling into welfare status; denied insurance; denied other kinds of credit or in cases of suspected credit fraud where you were the victim.