If you’ve ever received a phone call from a debt collector looking for someone else who owes money, thinking that person might be you, you may want to check your credit report and start looking for errors.
There might be a number of innocuous reasons why a debt collector would call you for a debt that isn’t yours. Wrong number, for instance. But there may be an error on your credit report, or all your credit reports, that has helped debt collectors mix you up with someone else — and is now hurting your credit score.
If you’ve never checked your credit report, that’s something to put on your to-do list. It may be an especially good idea with what’s been in the news lately; the credit bureau Equifax was hacked, and 143 million consumers’ personal information may now be in the hands of identity thieves. It’s also a good idea to check your credit report if you plan on applying for a loan in the near future, since you don’t need any errors like a false debt weighing down your credit score — or possibly convincing a lender you shouldn’t be borrowing money.
[See: 25 Ways to Fix Your Finances Fast.]
Any consumer can go to annualcreditreport.com, where you can pull three credit reports for free once a year, from each of the three credit-reporting bureaus. That said, you may well find that you’ll have trouble getting your reports promptly; the websites have been a overloaded as a result of the Equifax breach.
In any case, if you are successful in getting your report, and you look for errors, what might you find? You’ll want to pore over these three areas.
Start by looking at your biographical information. When you receive your credit report through the mail, or more likely, online, take a look at your name, phone number and address.
“More often than not, that’s where mistakes are going to be,” says Armand Goytia, a certified credit counselor and student loan counselor with Guidewell Financial Solutions, a nonprofit credit counseling service based out of Baltimore.
In fact, Goytia says, “Sometimes what happens is that people can’t even pull up their own credit report because the credit bureau has the incorrect social security number, or there’s some other profile information that’s incorrect.”
Well, that’s reassuring.
If that happens, Goytia says it can usually be straightened out fairly quickly by calling the bureau. That said, these days, the bureaus, even the ones not named Equifax, are pretty overloaded by calls from consumers who want to check their credit reports or do credit freezes.
[See: 8 Financial Steps to Take After Paying Off a Debt.]
Look at the debts. Now, if you’re lucky, you’ll have no debts in collections. You’ll just have credit card and car payment and house information, and perhaps student loan payments, and it’ll all show that you’ve been paying on time. You may end up really enjoying this part of checking your credit report since you can look back and realize how financially shrewd and responsible you’ve been. If you aren’t so lucky, there may be numerous mentions of your making payments late, or worse, you have a lot of COs (charge offs, which means that the creditor doesn’t expect you to pay them, and your debt has probably been passed off to a debt collector). If this is what your credit report looks like, this is probably not a fun trip down memory lane.
Whatever your debts look like, Goytia says you’ll want to take a look at everything on your report. If some of the memories on memory lane don’t belong to you — that is, you’re certain a debt listed isn’t yours, or that you paid it, you’ll want to dispute it.
“It can get confusing if you have an old debt,” Goytia says. “If it’s been passed onto collection agencies, and a lot of time has passed, that’s when people start having trouble remembering whether it’s valid or not.”
Look for incorrect information. Isn’t that what we’ve been doing all along? Well, yes, but after you’ve made sure your biographical information is correct, and you’ve established that the debts do belong to you, or they don’t, this is where you’ll want to drill down and look at the details more closely. Maybe you’re listed as the owner of a credit card account when it was your parent’s credit card, and you were an authorized user. Maybe there’s a credit card account that is shown as closed, but it’s actually open. It’s in your best interest for your credit score to include credit cards you’ve had for a lengthy time to show your credit history, and you’d want the report to reflect that.
Some types of incorrect information on your report can really end up hurting your report and score. You could have the same debt listed twice, for instance, making it look like you’ve borrowed more money than you have.
[See: 9 Financial Tools You Should Be Using.]
And if you have a large family, or you’ve co-mingled finances with parents or relatives, your odds of a mistake go up.
“If there’s going to be a mistake on your report, we often see it with family members,” Goytia says. “You all have the same last name. Maybe you had the same address.”
“Every error should be disputed. Even small errors,” says Michael Osakwe, based out of San Francisco and the content manager at NextAdvisor.com, a consumer information site that, among other things, specializes in credit card comparisons.
Osakwe says that inconsistencies on your credit report, over time, could create an alias for you. For instance, if your name is Jane Smith, but your maiden name is Johnson, you could one day be getting a call from a debt collector with an old file on Jane Johnson.
That doesn’t sound like a big deal, and it may not be, but it can be hard enough to juggle one credit persona — having two out there could make you more exposed to identity thieves, Osakwe says. And look at it this way: If you’re really wondering if it’s worth the trouble to dispute a few old debts that don’t quite have your accurate name on it, if you already get phone calls from debt collectors, telemarketers, and your everyday unfriendly scam artists, do you really want to put yourself in a position where you’re getting twice as many calls?
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3 Things to Fix on Your Credit Report originally appeared on usnews.com
