Credit Report Innacuracies

[Big A]

Millions of Americans have mistakes on their credit reports, some of which are serious enough to lower credit scores and result in worse credit offers, a new government study finds.

As many as 42 million Americans have errors on their credit reports, according to a Federal Trade Commission study of around 1,000 participants and 3,000 credit reports released Monday.

http://money.cnn.com/2013/02/11/pf/credit-report-errors/index.html

As the thread about the issue with mortgage escrow pointed to a mistake by bank, I also wanted to point out how credit reporting companies are not always correct.

Personally I have caught some blatant inaccuracies in my personal report. The first time was something so incredibly ignorant, I was amazed it even happended. In July of 2008, I purchased another 4-plex and financed about 40% with a mortgage originally with Countrywide. Well a week after closing, I receive a letter saying the loan was sold to Bank of America, and the first payment due August 2008 would be paid to them instead. Like all my accounts, I set it up for automatic payment and never missed a payment. Around November '09 I was about to purchase an office complex and pulled my credit report and to my surprise they had the original Countrywide loan that was sold BEFORE even one payment was due, showing 4 months of nonpayment. Now comes the even more amazing part, the dates for missed payments, JULY 2007 to OCTOBER 2007, a year before I even purchased.

I called into Experian to fix the issue and I was given this whole process of submitting a notarized form and mailing it in and waiting for it to get processed. I already had a property picked out that was a great deal and now risked losing it while Experian went through the process. I explained this to lhe lady on the phone and even pointed out their own information makes it impossible for this delinquency to be correct. The entry on the credit report actually says loan origination date 8/2008 then in next line shows Delinquent 7/07,8/07,9/07,10/07. She called a manger to look at it, but still made me go through formal process. It ended up taking over a month to correct my report and get new property, but only after putting up a huge deposit to hold building and extend loan approval period.

After this, I started pulling my credit every 6 months or so as I have never even had a 30 days late and any little thing drops my score under 800. Anyway, last year I had another issue that incorrectly put a collection on my report. I recently built and moved into a new house and when setting up cable and phone, I was told for billing, they usually transfer the account from one place to another at once. Since I planned on moving over a couple of days, I was asking if they could connect service at the new address and not dosconnect the old address for 3 days? The guy comes back and says he's just going to make an order to set up new service at my new house and then transfer my service over the following week when I finished moving.

Well what the guy actually did was make a new account in my name at my new address, and then a week later, my original account was transferred to new address, but the new account stayed active and was never cancelled. I called Cox cable the first few days at new house to make sure all installation fees would be convered by normal draft payments and didnt need to do anything else, and they confirmed it. Big surprise, 2 months later I get a collections notice for not paying the second account being billed to my house even though everything has been set up to automatically draft. It literally took almost 100 hours to clarify how I ended up being billed twice, finding manager to correct it, have them write a letter saying it was done in error so that I could use that to correct my credit! I basically did nothing wrong, yet I had to spend all this time fixing it.

Moral of the story, everyone can get a free copy of their credit report every year and should, don't trust everything is correct. I actually started using life lock and was recently saved from a 3rd mistake before it made it to my credit report so it's definitely worth it to me since I have a lot of different properties and each has its own tax, water ,electric, insurance, maintenance, pest service, alarm monitoring, elevator maint, gas, etc, I have easily over 50 accounts, so there is much bigger chance for a mistake.

[Big A]

TL:DR version

Credit reports have mistakes, pull your free copy annually and check!

Actual site suggested by FCC:

https://www.annualcreditreport.com/cra/index.jsp

[pstall]

the smart thing to do with your free reports is to get one from EACH reporting company quarterly. you can monitor your credit for the full year for FREE.