NIU

credit report

Posted by Stacy on Thursday, June 12, 2008 12:48 PM

Do you know your credit score? I bet if we went to a busy street and polled everyone walking by that more than half wouldn't know their own credit score. Or what the range is (I think its between 300 and 850) It seems like even though these resources, like free credit reports are available to people, they don't take full advantage of them, which is a shame because they are only hurting them selves. Is it that they choose not to take the time to look at their credit report? Or is it that they aren't aware of what is available to them?

Although I have had several classes on economics in both high school and college over the years, when I see commercials on t.v. or hear about credit reports I don't think that I fully grasp the concept either.

So I looked up credit reports to see what they entail completely. I found out that your credit report is basically a history of your credit (which is what we learned in all of those classes). It records everything from borrowing and repaying to whether or not you have filed for bankruptcy. Your credit report is used to decide whether or not you are "worthy" of receiving more, or another line of credit. So if you failed to repay credit cards in the past on time, or at all for some, you would not receive credit in the future.

Something interesting that I found out that shocked me was that in Canada (and some other countries) if you applied for credit of some sort before you had a social insurance number, and then afterwards, you could have two completely different credit reports. I'm not sure if this is bad or good. I guess it would depend on the person. If they had good credit, obviously that would want that to reflect all the time on them, but if they had bad credit before and had a chance to completely start over then I guess that could be a good mistake. What I found interesting was that a lot of these people have two separate reports but do not even know about it.

Its scary knowing that identity theft is growing and isn't that hard to get away with. So by keeping an eye on your credit report and your bills, you can prevent this from happening to you or at the very least, catch it before you are beyond all credit repair.