Most of your credit history is contained in a document known as your credit report. Your credit report includes details about your credit-based accounts. Creditors, lenders, and other businesses review your credit report whenever you make an application for a credit card, loan, or other service. The information in your credit report could lead your application to be accepted or denied.
Credit reports are maintained by credit bureaus, agencies who collect credit data from businesses and compile that information to sell back to other businesses.
Personal Information
Your credit report includes your personal identifying information. This includes your name and address. Variations and misspellings of your name might appear on your credit report as do your previous addresses. Misspellings of your name and incorrect addresses do not hurt your credit rating, but could indicate that you’ve been a victim of identity theft.
Account Information
The bulk of your credit report includes details about each of your credit accounts. Your creditor, type of account, date the account was opened, credit limit or loan amount, credit card balance or loan balance, and account status all appear on your credit report. A two-year payment history is listed on your credit report noting whether your payments have been on-time or late. If you’ve been late anytime within the past seven years, a notice will be included on your credit report.
Public Records
Each credit report includes a public records section that includes information about bankruptcy filings, foreclosure, tax liens, and court judgments. These are all serious delinquencies that severely damage your credit score.
Negative information, including negative entries in the public records section, stays on your credit report for seven years with the exception of bankruptcy, which remains for ten years.
Credit Inquiries
Finally, a list of recent credit report inquiries will appear on your credit report. Your version of your credit report will include “hard” inquiries made by businesses with whom you’ve made an application as well as inquiries from businesses who want to pre-approve you for credit cards, loans, and other services. These “soft” inquiries do not appear on the version of your credit report that’s viewed by lenders.
The information in your credit report is the sole factor for calculating your credit score, the numerical summary of your credit history. If your credit report contains significant negative information, you’ll have a negative credit score.
Federal law says that only accurate, verifiable information can appear on your credit report. You have the right to dispute any inaccurate or incomplete information with the credit bureau that issued the credit report.