Opinions and Reviews

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

A credit score can be critical to your personal finances. It determines whether you will get a loan, and the interest rates on the loans you get. It may be the difference between finding a nice house to rent, and applying fruitlessly again and again without success. Still, few people understand credit scores and what goes into them, and still fewer know how they can affect them.

Even if you do all you can to improve your credit, the question still remains: Can others actions affect my credit score? Unfortunately, the answer is yes. The good news is that there are many actions you can take to limit the damage to your annual credit report.

Credit bureaus keep a lot of information on file, and this information is summarized as a number. This number is a credit score. The most commonly used one, the FICO score, is the sum of three such scores from three different credit bureaus. To find out what your FICO score is, you can use the myfico service.

Credit scores change over time, as they are continuously updated with new information about your accounts and credits. The amount of money you owe in total, as well as the kind of debt you have and your payment history goes into your credit scores. Pure length of credit history will have an effect as well.

Payment history is the biggest factor that affects credit, and one of the ways that others can affect your credit score is if companies wrongly reports you as an unreliable bill payer. This does happen more than you would think, and it may be a battle to get the incorrect information changed.

People who have had this happen to them know that a single mistake in the information a company reports can cause them years of hassle. It takes lots of time and frustration to finally get the wrong information corrected so your credit score gets back to where it is supposed to be. The good news is that you have the law on your side, and most issues like this eventually come down in the customeras favor.

If you are surprised by the low credit score you have, itas worth your time to check up on the information about you that the credit bureaus are using to get to that number. Do they have any incorrect information about you? Usually youall already know if a company has been incorrectly reporting your payments. There can also incorrect information that is damaging your score.

So to answer the question of whether others can negatively impact your credit score, the answer is mixed. They can by making a mistake, but if you are vigilant and take the time and effort to correct those mistakes you can get your credit back to its rightful place.

Tweet This Post