Control Your Debt - Credit Repair Advice & Articles :: How to read your credit report, check credit report...

How to read your credit report by Admin at 06:03PM (PST) on January 10, 2005 | Permanent Link | Cosmos Charge-offs, inquiries, R1s -- what's it all mean? Here's how to understand this increasingly crucial document So you've decided to get your credit report... But now that you've got it, there are an awful lot of numbers, abbreviations and terms you've never seen before. Trade lines, charge-offs, account review inquiries -- how do you read this thing? First off, there are three major credit-reporting agencies in the United States: Experian, TransUnion and Equifax. Every 12 months, you can print a copy of your credit file from all three agencies by going to a single Web site, www.annualcreditreport.com. "Looking at one is a useless endeavor; you need to look at all three," says Howard Dvorkin, president of Consolidated Credit Counseling Services in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. "People tend to pull one and think everything is the same on all of them. That's not normally the case." The reports will have different information because it's a voluntary system, and creditors subscribe to whichever agency they want -- if any at all. Maxine Sweet, vice president of consumer education at Experian, stresses the importance of ordering the report