Just a few short years ago, a law was enacted which said that you could get a copy of your credit history report free once per year. This was a great idea, and a lot of people took advantage of this. But still, the one thing that puzzles me is why more people are not taking advantage of this law?

It is because not everyone knows that their credit report contains more errors that it is worth. Thats right, it contains errors, and the number of errors it contains is anybodys guess. The reason for this is the sheer volume of data that the credit bureaus need to process and keep track of. And then one lender who had a contract with say Experian changes their contract so that now they report to Equifax, and the problem becomes even greater.

I would encourage you to spend a couple of minutes to think about this. All businesses and all consumers, past and present, plus all account they currently have plus all accounts they have ever had equals literally BILLIONS of data records that they need to keep track of and maintain. That is a database nightmare. Now if only 1% of that data is in errors, that means that several MILLION erroneous records are in there, and the actual estimate for the amount of errors is greater than 27%, according to recent studies.

But something that most people are not in tune with is that it is THEIR responsibility to get those errors corrected. The errors do not correct themselves, and will never get corrected if you do not initiate action to get them corrected. One of the things that compounds this problem even more is that you need to dispute that error with each of the three credit bureaus Equifax, Trans Union, and Experian because they do not share data between them.

One of the biggest problems with having errors in your credit report is that your credit score is not reported accurately. This could be good or could be bad, but for the most part, you need to assume it is bad and that the credit score assigned to you by the credit bureaus (individually) is lower than it should be.

So how do you get the wrong information removed from your credit report? The first thing to do is get a copy of your credit report, and get a separate copy from each of the three credit bureaus. Then you start the pain-staking process of going through the report, line by line, and noting everything that is not accurate, and then you file a dispute form with that credit bureau.

What happens when you dispute something is that the credit bureau has 30 days in which to either verify the information, or to remove it. If it cannot be verified, then they have a legal obligation to remove it. So for an account that has been paid off for 3 or 4 years, what incentive is there for the lender to verify that information? There is none, and chances are good that the negative information will be removed.

Now there is the question of the stuff that is REALLY in error, instead of just the stuff that while technically accurate, still reflects poorly on you. But with this, the procedure to file a dispute is exactly the same, and the credit bureaus have those same 30 days to either prove the information or to remove it from your credit report.

When your credit report is squeaky clean, your resulting credit score will be as high as it should be, and that is, after all, what you wanted to accomplish!

Jon Arnold
http://www.articlesbase.com/finance-articles/raise-your-credit-score-and-start-your-new-life-120847.html

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