11 Oct Free Credit Report Example
Understanding your credit report is an important part of ensuring financial wellness. They depict your behaviour with credit, and it’s something that potential employers, lenders, insurers, and even landlords look at when considering you for loans, insurance, employment, or even car finance.
Your credit report contains important information about how you’ve behaved with credit in the past, like payment history, accounts you have open, derogatory marks, and whether you apply for new credit often. All of these things act as hints as to whether someone should consider you for finance. Late payments, for instance, might suggest you’re not particularly good at paying on time and are a potential default risk.
Read on to discover a credit report example and the meaning behind each item or section on your report.
What’s in Your Credit Report?
Your credit report contains your personal information, negative items, satisfactory items, credit inquiries, and public records.
Personal Information
This includes information like your full name and aliases you might be known as. It also includes your telephone numbers, addresses, your ID number, and date of birth. This information comes from past disclosures to creditors.
Tip: Make sure this information is correct. If there is information incorrectly reported, it could be a sign of theft or fraud.
Public Records
This is data collected from court records that creditors may view negatively, like debt review codes and flags, default judgments, tax incompliance, bankruptcy, administration orders, and garnishee orders.
Adverse Accounts
The adverse accounts section of your credit report shows lines of credit that have not been paid, have missed or late payments, were sent to a collection agency or were “charged off” meaning that the company reported the debt as lost income and may have sold the debt to a collection agency. A history of late payments lowers your credit score, especially if it’s more recent. Many lenders will not offer credit until overdue debts have been paid. This section includes accounts in arrears, defaults, and accounts in collections.
Tip: after a certain period, unpaid debts may become prescribed–able to be written off and removed from your credit profile should they have gone unacknowledged by you and your creditor. Contact Credit Boost to find out more.
Satisfactory Accounts
Satisfactory accounts are accounts that have been paid as agreed. This information is reported by lenders to some or all the bureaus. Having accounts that you pay off on time and regularly makes for an excellent credit score.
There are two types of credit you might see reported: instalment and revolving. Instalment credit is one large piece of credit paid off in chunks, or instalments (for example, car finance).
Revolving credit is a certain amount of credit that you’re allowed to take out. Once you’ve paid off the amount you’ve used, you can use that exact amount of money or more without worrying about losing access–this credit is revolving (for example, store or credit cards).
Inquiries
When you formally apply for credit using a hard (regular) inquiry, it shows up on your credit report. Too many of these at once tell lenders that you’re desperate for credit, so you should do your best to limit your amount of hard inquiries.
The other sort of inquiry is called a soft or self-inquiry, and lenders do not see these. The National Credit Act mandates that each bureau provide you with a credit report per year. This is to ensure your optimal financial wellness, screen for fraud, and help address poor credit use.
Where to Get a Free Credit Report
If you would like a credit report with no harm or impact on your score, try Credit Boost’s free credit checker. All we need is your ID number and contact details to check your score. From there, you’ll gain access to a free, full credit report that includes your credit score.
If you have any questions regarding your score or items on your report, contact Credit Boost. We would love to be of assistance.