Credit Bureaus

Everyone knows how important their credit score is. Without a decent credit score, you can forget about getting credit cards, getting an auto loan, getting a mortgage, and many other things you may need or want to do. But who keeps track of these scores anyway? Where do the companies to who you apply for a loan get their information? There are three major credit bureaus that act as the gatekeepers for your credit score. These credit bureaus gather information about you and dole it out to companies who enquire about your credit. You definitely don’t want to get on the wrong side of these credit reporting agencies. When it comes to getting credit, they can literally make or break you.

In the US, the three major credit reporting bureaus are Experian credit bureau, Transunion credit bureau, and Equifax credit bureau. Each of these companies probably has a file on you, but the thing that gets confusing is that each company’s file probably does not contain the same information. Different companies report account information to different credit reporting agencies, so while Equifax may know that you forgot to pay your phone bill last month, the other two bureaus might have received a report from the phone company about it. Each credit bureau uses the information they have on file about you to generate your credit score, which of course may differ from company to company depending what they have on record about you. When lenders pull your credit, they generally take an average of all three scores to use as your main credit score.

With all of the confusion over credit scores, and with identity theft on the rise, the 3 main credit bureaus have made it easy for consumers to view their credit reports and monitor changes. By federal law, each company is required to provide one free report to each citizen per year. If you want more reports than that, each company has a monthly subscription plan that lets you monitor your credit report for changes on a regular basis. This is a very important way to make sure all of the information on your report is correct and that no one is getting credit under your name and defaulting on bills, getting you into trouble. Removing information from credit bureau reports can be an arduous process, so make sure you keep good financial records in case you see something on your reports that you need to fix.