Credit Report - How to Read it

1. First Capital Inquiry Removal Credit Report - How to Read it So you’ve gotten your credit report from all 3 bureaus. How are you going to figure it out? All those numbers, letters and codes. It’s fairly simple once you break it down. Basically, there are 4 sections to a credit report: your identification, your credit history, your public records and inquiries made.

2. Your identification is just that. The info that pertains to your identity. It’s very common for mistakes to occur here. When someone reports info about you, it could be wrong, but it remains here until you have it removed. Make sure your name is spelled correctly, your SS# is correct etc. You will probably see your address and previous addresses, birth date, telephone numbers, employers, spouses name etc. I’d worry if you have an incorrect SS# attached to your name. That could lead to fraud or inaccuracies in your credit history section. That’s something you want to take care of.

3. Next you’ll see your credit history. This is what we will be working with. It will contain pretty much every account you’ve ever had. You’ll see the account name, number, date it was opened, kind of credit it is, the amount you owe, the credit limit, the highest balance etc. It also includes all the bad things we need to remove: the charge-offs, the write-offs, the collections, the repos, the late payments etc. This is the heart of your credit report and what we need to fix.

4. The next section is public records. You’ll see and bankruptcies, tax liens and judgements, foreclosures etc here. The next section is inquiries. Any time someone looks at your credit, it shows up here. There are hard and soft inquiries. Hard inquiries include car loan applications, mortgage applications, credit card applications. Normally when you fill out a form to ask for credit, it is a hard inquiry. Soft inquiries are from all of those “Pre approval” credit card ads you get. We’ll look more closely at the credit history section in the next post.