Why, why, in what fucking universe, what war did we lose, where we have to pay to see our credit report if we want to look at it more than once per year? What? I have to pay money to see information you are collecting about me? Huh?
I am the third line of my family name, and as such ALWAYS add my suffix III, not JR like my dad ALWAYS uses. It is important to include so you don’t have mixups.
So why do I have to “verify” my address, which is actually my dad’s? Because they didn’t keep suffix straight. Its not like we have something unique like…oh…social security numbers to differentiate us. WTF!
The ball is in MY court? I have to verify that I DON’T owe that debt? Well gee I thought this was America and you were innocent until proven guilty.
Now begins Anthony Corporation. I am sending everyone which I can find an address for a bill for $100, and if they don’t pay it I will attack their credit. Sure they don’t owe me anything, but the effort involved in removing it would be much more costly than the $100, so I win.
Funny…it took 30 seconds for them to add incorrect information about a debt that I didn’t owe, but despite various mailings, emails, online disputes, confirmation mailing, it still isn’t off after 3 months?
And to anyone saying you don’t NEED credit…I say welcome to America. You don’t need a car either, right? FUCK
A credit report is not some government report. It is a reporting tool, produced for profit, by agencies and purchased by lenders and others. A lot of work goes into producing and maintaining the reports, and the parties that do so have every right to be compensated for the same.
We use credit reports here, and they cost us $3.00 a report. I’m not sure why people think they need to be free, but even if they’re not, that’s only $9, assuming you want to see all 3 companies’ reports on you.
Now, I’m not defending their bizarre and arcane practices, and I think it should be easier to navigate when something goes wrong. However, you may know you are getting screwed, but people protest “bad” credit all the time, far more often than mistakes are made. Creditors deserve to get paid, and it’s always a he said/she said case.
What this rant leaves out is the lovely practice of your credit score taking a dip for daring to LOOK at your report. That’s enough for me to advocate turning someone like Elizabeth Warren or Ralph Nader loose on this industry.
Why not? The credit agencies are doing you a tremendous favor. Without them, every time you needed credit, you would be expected to produce all of that information - do you really have receipts for every payment you’ve made in the last two or three years on every credit account you have?
Perhaps the only thing more annoying and pervasive than the resident idiocy of credit reporting agencies is the proliferation of incorrect information and urban legends about how credit reports and scoring works.
Who needs receipts? All I need is confirmation from my prior accounts that I am in good standing or timely paid off the relevant loan. They’re doing potential creditors a favor, not me; without the credit agency, the creditor would be stuck with whatever I told them my debts were.
Frontier cable has shit service and prices, so I hand in my modem, pay my last month, and get a receipt. I am NOT under contract.
I sign up with Northland, but receive a bill from Frontier, still. I call them, they say it was an accident, don’t pay it.
Happens again a month later, I get it in writing, no problem.
THEN IT HITS MY CREDIT REPORT AS UNPAID! I call these scumbags and they say it was another mistake, and give me a written document proving I don’t owe.
I dispute it on my credit report, and mail my proof. What happens? DENIED!
Denied? Really? Well…I hope you get skinned alive.
However, you’re the one who needs the loan. The bank is “stuck with” nothing if you refuse or cannot give them the information they want. They just won’t write the loan.
In addition, a credit report has more than “good standing” on it - they’re assessing your credit worthiness, and just because you’re on time with your car note now doesn’t mean that you just caught up three month’s worth of payments for the eighth time.
Point is - they’re not going to take your word for it. I’m sure we’re all good citizens and would never lie or omit anything. But we all know people who would. That is why credit reports are a thing.
This. The banks aren’t doing you a favor by extending a loan. They’re making a ton of money off you for extending you a loan. And those are some of the biggest money makers for banks. So I don’t think it’s a valid assumption that without the credit reporting agencies, there would be no more loans.
There were, of course, loans before there were credit reporting agencies. But they were available to only a select class of people who had the established reputation (or family name) that indicated they could pay it back. Credit was out of reach for the vast majority of the population.
Automated credit reporting (and lots of other technological developments) made banking and credit available to everyone. That has vastly improved the wealth and living conditions of the developed world over the last couple centuries. Take a look at how homeownership rates have changed since 1900, for example. Banks couldn’t finance that many loans if they had to rely on every individual borrower to prove their worthiness.
The increase in home ownership rates corresponds much more closely to the 1950s economic boom and the rise of the two-income family. Credit reporting agencies as we know them today really didn’t exist until the late sixties.
By all means, educate me. I’m unfamiliar with the term “soft pull” except as regards… you know.
What I do know is I was discouraged by my credit union from them or me looking at my credit report because the act of doing so would impact it negatively. This was during a mortgage process. Does that involve something other than a soft pull?
If a “hard pull” is something that happened during my mortgage, does that negatively affect the report, and if so, why?
A soft pull is one that doesn’t require your consent. Generally it will be for credit card preapproval and stuff like that. Your own annual credit inquiry counts as a soft pull.
A hard pull is the one a lender does when you actually open a credit line (mortgage, credit card, auto loan, whatever), and does hurt your credit score.