How to find credit report errors

Credit reports have lots of information about your credit history.  As with anything so complex and full of data, the credit report is not easy to read or understand, let alone find an error.

Creditors report to national credit reporting agencies (i.e. – TransUnion, Experian, Equifax) who then prepare a credit report.  You, creditors and the government are among those who can see your credit report.  Your credit score is based on this credit report.  When creditors report incorrectly, it can have a major effect on your credit score for years.

Errors happen because names are similar, addresses are mismatched, social security numbers are off by a digit or two, accounts get crossed.  It happens all the time.  In fact, the Public Institute Research group has reported that up to 80% of credit reports have errors.  Its almost never the fault of a national credit reporting agencies.  They are data repositories and simply report information they get from creditors, collectors or court houses.

The problem is most people don’t know how to find find errors and it is your personal responsibility to ensure your credit report is as accurate as possible.  There are few easy ways to understand your credit report and even fewer tools to fix problems.

So what can you do?

SmartCredit.com has a very simple, easy to understand credit report with Action buttons to fix credit report errors, get goodwill corrections, eliminate identity theft and settle debts.  There is personalized video assistance and pop-up bubble help that shows you were to look for things like errors.

Below is a screen shot showing how to find credit report errors and take action, within the Jean Chatzky Score Builder app, included free with SmartCredit.com membership:

Be proactive about your credit report and credit score!  Use SmartCredit.com and its unrestricted free trial to see your free credit scores.  Use the action buttons to communicate directly with over 36,000 creditors for anything you need, including credit score improvement, remove identity theft and even get a goodwill removal of negative items on your credit report.  You can even ask for a more competitive interest rate on your credit cards.  It’s fast and effective and just takes the simple push of a button.

SmartCredit.com also includes both credit monitoring and identity protection, with a mobile rapid response system, for the fastest way to detect and stop identity theft.  Remember, you need both credit monitoring and identity protection.  Having one or the other is not good enough.  Credit monitoring alone will only show you what’s happened after the damage is done. Our identity protection with mobile rapid response will help you stop fraud before it impacts your credit and finances.

Additionally, identity theft insurance or guarantees are often not a good way to fix the problem.  It will simply bog your down in endless paperwork and third parties trying to do the work you can easily do with the push of a button in SmartCredit.com

David B. Coulter – founder and C.E.O. of SmartCredit.com

Categorised in: Credit Monitoring, Credit Report, Credit Score, Improving Credit, jean chatzky, Money & Identity, Uncategorized

This post was written by David B. Coulter