Almost everyone knows that there is a credit report on them "somewhere" but surprisingly few people know more than that, mostly because they don't think they need to know. The truth of the matter is that nothing could be more incorrect, and what you don't know is almost certainly hurting you in this case.

There are actually three major credit reporting agencies, which are Equifax, TransUnion and Experian. To explain the problem, let me start by saying that these companies compete with each other and do not share information amongst themselves. Now let me say some lenders report to one of them while other creditors report to another one, and the bigger ticket lenders such as your mortgage company may report to two or even all three of them.

But it gets even more complex. Again, they are in business to make a profit, so they want to get as many lenders reporting to them as possible. As such, they have "specials" to entice lenders to come to them, so Mastercard may have report to Experian last year but now reports to TransUnion, Discover reported to Equifax last year and now reports to Experian, and so on. This change occurs all the time on a regular basis.

With this background information, are you starting to see where the problem occurs? First of all, there is not any single credit reporting agency that knows the WHOLE credit story behind you. Moreover, when Visa reported that overdue account last year and now is reporting to another company, that original company keeps on reporting that overdue account because the information is never corrected.

Research and studies have found that a majority, a large majority of the US population have errors in their credit reports with one or more of these three agencies. The overall impact of these errors is that when the credit bureau calculates your credit score, it is almost certainly lower than it should really be. This in turn means that you are not getting the best interest rate on your credit cards, car loans, and mortgage, and this can also have similar negative effects in other parts of your financial life.

There is no self-correct mechanism built into the system, and these errors will never be corrected unless YOU do it. There are right and wrong ways to get this information corrected and if you don't do it right, you could make it even worse. You need to make your dispute be legitimate, not frivolous. There are a lot of people out there with accurate negative information on their credit report who are disputing that information with the credit bureaus in the hopes that even though it is accurate, it will disappear. You on the other hand have a legitimate beef that you want incorrect information corrected.

There is no sense in having inaccurate information about you being reported as accurate and factual. Get it corrected, and this is something you can do yourself, where you do not need to spend money on a "credit fix". This is entirely legal, and is indeed your responsibility. You are only hurting yourself if you don't get this done.

Tags: how to repair credit, credit repair after bankruptcy, credit repair letters