Understanding Why You Should Clean Your Credit Report and What Can Be Removed

A Credit Article Contributed by Brandie King

Why Should You Bother Cleaning up Your Credit Report?

Your credit report is one of the strongest and best tools you have when it comes to your financial life, so cleaning it up is one of the things that you should concentrate heavily on. Your credit report and credit score can affect many aspects of your life.

These include whether or not you will be approved for new credit cards and loans, whether or not you can get good rates on your insurance, auto loans, and home mortgage loans, and sometimes even whether or not you are hired by a prospective employer. So as you can see it is definitely worth your time to get your credit report as clean as possible.

Cleaning up Your Credit Report: How to Get Your Credit Reports

The easiest way to get your credit reports from the three major credit bureaus is to visit their websites and order your reports online from them. The three major credit bureaus are three separate agencies and you should therefore get your reports from all three of them separately. Their websites are Experian (http://www.experian.com), Equifax (http://www.equifax.com), and Trans Union (http://www.transunion.com). The other important thing that you need to know about their websites is that they all three have the option to dispute errors online via online forms.

Cleaning up Your Credit Report: What to Look for and What Can Be Removed or Fixed

The first thing that you need to understand is that you should not waste your time trying to get accurate and correct negative information removed from your report. You also should not fall for any person or company that claims that they can do so. To be very blunt about why, the only way to go about doing it is against the law. You are trying to clean up your credit report, not get arrested. The following is a list of errors, inaccuracies, and incorrect information that you should be on the look out for when examining your credit reports.

Check to see if any of the following information is incorrect, incomplete, missing, or outdated: name, address(es), phone number(s), Social Security number, date of birth, aliases that you've used, employment information (current and previous), marital status. Also check to make sure that there aren't any entries on your reports that belong to somebody with the same name or a Social Security number that is similar to yours.

Check for duplicate accounts, debts that belonged to your current spouse before you got married, lawsuits that you were not a part of. Check for the following on accounts that do belong to you: unpaid liens that you paid, incorrect account histories, incorrectly listed accounts (closed accounts listed as open, accounts you closed that don't have the "closed by consumer" notation).

Cleaning up Your Credit Report: These Accounts Can Be Removed after a Certain Length of Time

You can request the following items be removed after a certain length of time has passed: bankruptcies (10 years or older), charged off accounts (after 7 years), closed accounts with late pays (after 7 years), accounts sent to collections (after 7 years), inquiries (after 2 years), judgments (after 7 years). Tax liens (city, county, state, federal) will remain on your reports for an indefinite amount of time and can't be removed.