Buying A House? Check Your Credit History Now
A lot of my friends are thinking about buying, or have already bought, a home this summer. If you’re planning on buying a house in the next year, check your credit history right now for inaccuracies (it’s free!). According to Consumer Reports, about 13 million inaccuracies are discovered each year, which means there’s a uncomfortable chance your credit report will have something wrong on it. Hopefully it’s something harmless, but if it isn’t then you’ll want to correct it asap.
Not buying a house for several months? This is actually the perfect time to check because it can take as many as 90 days to correct error (yeah, ninety days) because the bureaus need to research your claim.
Check your credit history for free at the government mandated AnnualCreditReport website. You can get a copy of your report once every year from each of the three bureaus. If you’re buying a house, I’d get all three at the same time to verify accuracy. If you aren’t and just want to use it, I’d stagger them out a few months so you can get a rolling 3-month old view of your credit history.
Happy house hunting!
Print Article
Email Article
Stumble It!
Bookmark
reddit.com
Tags: AnnualCreditReport.com, Credit History
| Related Posts |
Did you like this article? If so, you can get all the latest articles delivered to your email inbox for free each morning by entering your email address in the box below. Your email will only be used to deliver this once-daily subscription and you can unsubscribe at any time.
There are 4 comments, add your thoughts now!
Has anyone tried to correct an error in their credit report? I’d definitely be curious how difficult the process would be.
We just checked ours prior to our refinance.
@ Luke: We had an error, and we submitted a dispute online. It was fixed in four days. Not bad!
The process isn’t hard, you simply fill out a form, the credit bureau researches it, and it gets fixed. I had to fix an address and prove I didn’t have a cell phone with a particular provider. I had to prove my address over that period, by faxing them some bank statements, and they fixed it.
90 days must be some sort of legal limit? I had a similar experience to My Dollar Plan … One of our local banks had reported a line of credit open in our name. It had no funds drawn on it, and a perfect payment history… From what I can tell it was probably *improving* our score. But, since it was outside of our control, I had it removed - took about 5 days.
Previous Article: « Your Take: Do You Give To Panhandlers?
Next Article: TradeKing Review »