If you\'ve been awake in today\'s society at all, you know how important your credit report is. You can make a difference between being eligible for a loan or credit card, or not. Even some jobs are off-limits to people who have bad credit reports. In fact, negative report affects your life badly in general, because you\'ll simply find it harder to do some things. By contrast, good credit report can make all the difference in ways you might not even be aware of.



If your credit is poor, you may not even know this is true. It\'s also true that you might not deserve it, because the information making it that way isn\'t actually yours. It\'s a known fact that the credit bureaus make mistakes routinely, and put inaccurate information on your credit report.





However, you can check your credit report information and make sure everything on it is accurate. You need to correct inaccurate information that could be causing your credit score to drop, so that your credit report truly reflects your own behavior.



How to Check Your Report



To check the accuracy of your credit report, obtain copies of your credit report from the three bureaus. Consumers are allowed one free credit report from each of the three bureaus every year from a government run website called annualcreditreport.com. Or you can access the reports for a fee from each of the three credit bureau sites directly. You do need all three credit reports so that you can take care of all three when you fix inaccurate information.



Next, look at each of the three credit reports carefully, and determine if everything on them is correct. If you find anything that you don\'t recognize or that you think is wrong, take a highlighter and simply highlight over, so that it\'s easily visible. Do this for each of the three reports. You should know that it\'s entirely possible that not all of your information is going to be on there. Some creditors don\'t report their information regularly, so you may find things missing that are yours, but the key here is to look for things that aren\'t yours.



Among other things you should look at is the status of your accounts, assuming they are yours. Is everything on each of the reports showing accurately? For example, if you have paid an account off in full or it is current, does it still show as \"past due\"? Are accounts showing as open actually closed? These, too, should be highlighted as erroneous.



Once you\'ve noted things you don\'t recognize or that are inaccurate, it\'s time to begin disputes. First, though, the most important things to address are the accounts that you don\'t recognize and that are yours. This could be a sign of identity theft, or it could be a benign mistake. For example, if you have a very common name, you simply could have ended up with another \"John Smith\"\'s activity on your credit report. These are easily rectified simply by disputing the information and saying that it\'s erroneous.



However, another darker problem that\'s becoming increasingly common is actual identity theft. This is not benign and a simple case of misreporting. This means that someone is actually taking your identity and impersonating you to get credit or other financial resources, use it, and then not pay it off, so that now, it shows up on your credit report as negative information. Make note of every account that\'s not yours.



How to Fix Errors



Once you\'ve got your three credit reports in hand with all of the highlighted errors, draft a letter to each credit reporting agency for EACH error separately and dispute the authenticity of the errors. This means that the credit reporting agency in question has to begin to investigate the claims; what they must do is request up-to-date information from the creditor to show that the account listing is in fact valid. If the information is found incorrect, it will be corrected or removed, as applicable. If the creditor does not respond within 30 to 60 days, the negative information will be removed entirely. This can greatly improve your credit score with little effort from you.