How to Spot and Fix Errors on Your Credit Report
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Here's your money briefing for Monday, October 4th. I'm J.R. Whelan for The Wall Street Journal. If you pay your bills and spend below your credit limit, you might not think you need to check your credit reports regularly. Turns out you should check it for errors. Mistakes in your credit report can undo your due diligence and do damage to your personal finances.
It can be harder to get a mortgage or get a good loan, a favorable loan on a car, for example. The other thing is that when you're going to rent an apartment, sometimes landlords look at your credit.
So how would you know if there's an error on your credit report? And what steps can you take to rectify it before it's too late? WSJ contributor Cheryl Winokur-Munk will be here with tips on how to dot your I's and cross your T's. That's after the break.
This podcast is brought to you by ReliaQuest. Cyber criminals are constantly attacking. They want your data. They want your identity. They want your innovation. ReliaQuest fortifies your business with agentic defense, AI that detects, contains, and eliminates cyber threats in minutes. It helps your security team move faster at the work that matters most to protect the business now and delivers insights to help them predict what's next. ReliaQuest, agentic defense for the enterprise. Learn more at ReliaQuest.com. That's R-E-L-I-A-Q-U-E-S-T.com.
Hey Cheryl, thanks so much for being with us.
Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
So Cheryl, what typically is a tip-off to a consumer that there is something out of sorts with their credit report?
Well, you may not know it unless you go to apply for a loan and someone says, well, you know, your credit is X and you wonder why. I mean, that's if something, there's an error that would affect that. But it may just be something innocent, like you're checking your credit reports, which you really should do. once a year.
How can I tell if there are errors on my credit report?
And now with the pandemic, the credit agencies have allowed you to do it once a week until April 2022. So it may be something where you're actually applying for some kind of a loan where you run into a problem, or it just may be something you're thumbing through the profile and or through your report, just innocently saying, just checking to make sure there are no errors and you see something amiss.
But how do these mistakes happen? And what do they look like on a credit report?
Well, oftentimes the lender will make an error. Let's say that you made a payment. Let's say the payment was for $1,000 and then there's just the fat finger problem where it becomes $6,000 or it can be a misspelling or a phone number is wrong. The errors really run the gamut. Sometimes they can be very small errors that really don't make a difference. And sometimes people's credit profiles even get mixed up, which are much bigger errors. Like you have a similar name or a similar social security number. And then, you know, you're mixed up with somebody else and that can be a real, real headache to fix.
Okay. So let's talk about fixing these errors. Can people do this on their own? And what's the first step they should take?
So it's really important to try to do this on your own first because a lot of mistakes can be fixed by the consumer. You're going to want to go to all three credit agencies and you can find them online. The three credit bureaus are Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. And you're going to want to go to each of their websites, request your credit report. And then once you can look at those reports and see what the mistake is, on each of their websites, there's a procedure that you have to follow to ask for the report to be fixed.
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