3 Simple Ways to Improve Your Credit Management
3 Simple Ways to Improve Your Credit Management. Use the credit industry’s changed landscape to your advantage.
If you’ve ever felt the rules of credit management to be elusive, you’re not alone. Luckily, credit reporting companies are fairly transparent about what it takes to build and maintain good credit, and much of what it takes to have good credit is in your control. Here are three steps to take that can help improve your credit management skills.
Here are three steps to help you be better at credit management:
1. Check your credit.
The first step to good credit management is to find out the state of your credit. That’s easy to do, as you can pull up all three of your credit reports for free once per year at AnnualCreditReport.com.
The reason you have three credit reports (and why it’s important to check them all) is that there are three credit reporting companies — all of which have individual reports on your credit. Financial institutions that report your credit activity to credit reporting agencies aren’t required to send the data to all three, so each of your reports can vary.
Here are a few of the things to look for when you’re reviewing your reports:
- Make sure your personal information is correct (and especially keep an eye out for typos in your name and social security number)
- Review each account to ensure that you have, in fact, opened or authorized every account that shows up
- Check the details of each account for accuracy, including things like payment history, account status, and balance
If you spot any errors as you review your credit reports, you can dispute those errors with the credit reporting agency whose report has the error. Before you do, note that your credit reports are not updated on a daily basis, so things like your balance won’t be accurate to the date. If something like that looks incorrect, you can verify the information by going to your financial statements to see if your balance matched that amount at any point in the previous month. Read here for more information on what you can dispute on a credit report.
