Have you ever applied for a charge account, personal loan, insurance or job?

Chances are you have. If you have, they have a file on you. This file includes a bunch of personal and financial information about you. It includes where you live, work, how you pay your bills, whether you’ve been sued, arrested or ever gone bankrupt. And just who are “they”?

They are the Consumer Reporting Agencies (CRAs), small companies across the map that get this information about you and sell it to other companies for a profit.

The CRAs sell this information about you to Credit Reporting Bureaus (CRBs). There are three Credit Reporting Bureaus: Equifax, Experian and Trans Union. What they sell is basically what is called a consumer credit report. You already know that a consumer credit report is used to evaluate how worthy you are financially to receive a loan of any sort.

What’s staggering about all this is how wrong most of these reports that the CRAs sell are. Over 75% of all credit reports contain some sort of error that will affect your ability to get the loan, mortgage or lease or a car you need.

Surveys show that almost all consumers have at some point or another in their lives have a problem with inaccuracies on their credit report. 25% of all credit reports contain an error so great that it will prevent a consumer from getting credit easily.

There are certain rights that all consumers have that very few people know about. It’s my intention to inform you of them now becuase regardless of what anyone tells you, you CAN repair your own credit!

In fact, anyone who has a credit report has a right to dispute anything that appears on your report. Once an item is disputed, the credit bureau must prove that it is true, or they must remove it.

More often than not, what happens is that credit bureaus can’t prove the information they have, and they are forced to remove the information.

The first step is always to get your report so you can see what information the bureaus have on you. As I said previously, there are three of them. It’s more than likely that more than one of the bureaus has information about you, so you should contact all three and get each report.

You can get all 3 reports for free at Free Credit Report.

I’ll share some steps to begin removing negative entries off your credit report in my next post.

To your good credit!

Amanda Layne