Knowing what is on your credit report is the first step to making major purchases and protecting your financial future. It is important that what's on the report is accurate and current. Errors and inaccuracies can lead to problems that range from having to pay additional fees and increased interest rates to being denied credit altogether. If you come across any errors on your credit report, there are several steps you can take to make sure that you are protected.
Contact Your Creditors
Whether it is a change of name or a change of address, the information might not always reach your creditors. Just because you are receiving your bills in the correct location with the correct name does not necessarily mean that it is correct throughout their system. If your creditor has incorrect information, it will continue reporting it to the credit monitoring agencies. Call your creditors to verify that the information in their systems is up-to-date. Once the information is updated, they will report the current information to the credit agencies. Usually this happens at the end of the billing cycle in which the latest payment was received--generally no more than 30 days.
Contact Credit Agencies
After you have updated your information with your creditors, contact the major credit monitoring agencies (Equifax, Experian and Trans Union) to make sure that the new information has been included and any outdated information has been removed. To do this, you must contact them through certified letter informing them of the error and asking the bureau to investigate and remove the item or items. It is important that you are specific about what you want removed. Remember that you are not the only person inquiring about errors, and chances are the person reading the letter is not interested in hunting through your entire credit history to find what is wrong. Include a copy of your credit report with the errors in question highlighted. It probably will take time before you see any change in your credit report because the agencies are only required to update their information every 90 days.
Get Confirmation
Getting confirmation is perhaps the most important step, especially when dealing with creditors. Calling them to ask that your errors be corrected is fine, but be sure to ask for written confirmation that it has been done. The best option is to ask for the UDF or Universal Data Form, which is the form your creditors send to the credit agencies to update your report. Ask creditors to send the UDF to your other creditors as well. Sometimes inaccurate information from one creditor will affect a person's standing with a different creditor. This is a good way to make sure that all creditors have your current information. At the very least, ask for a letter of confirmation ensuring that your report has been updated. When dealing with the credit bureaus, make sure that all of your communication is by certified letter to verify that your correspondence has been received.
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