My question was really not about what negatively affects your credit, or how one may be potentially unaware. Those were just comments I threw in for fun. I really wanted to know if people can report negative information about you without first notifying you, or trying to reach a resolution in any way.
Apparently they can. That’s messed up!
Oh yeah, and those Freecreditreport.com commerials are annoying and full of lies! Free credit report if you pay first.
It’s possible, but if you do it to me the first thing I’ll do is nicely ask you to remove the tradeline. Failing that…
The second thing I’ll do is apply for a refi on my house, hoping to have the tradeline mentioned as a reason for denial.
The third thing I’ll do is sue you for the $30K I couldn’t save because I couldn’t refinance my house.
If you wish to execute on your nefarious plan, feel free to victimize me all day long.
That is, if you have a steady paycheck I can garnish and lots of property in your name without liens on it…
I’m not sure if you meant that to sound semi-snotty or not. Actually, I was addressing the part of your OP where you said that you figured most people would be aware of things negatively impacting their credit; in fact, many people are not. Also, leaving aside what you personally may know as the OP’er, a lot of people are unaware of how their credit can be negatively affected, and they may be reading the thread too. But if you were really only seeking discussion or responses to the last sentence of your OP, then the answer is “Yes.”
It’s because for an optimal credit score you must have the correct delicate magical balance between credit available, credit used, and how you’ve used your availabe credit in the past (payment history). Too little available credit means you’re a poor risk; too much gives you too much opportunity to chuck your responsible existence and screw the credit card companies by a short, fast liquor and credit card fueled existence. Too much credit used means you owe too much; too little means you don’t have a reliable credit history.
So when you close open lines of credit, you can negatively impact your availabe credit AND your ratio of “available credit to credit used,” both of which are factors to setting your score. BUT if you have too much available credit, that’s bad too, so maybe closing an account or two would be a GOOD thing.
Confused yet? I think they set the scores by rolling the knuckle bones of ancient Egyptians while sacrificing a live chicken over a Magic 8 Ball.
I never understood the logic of dinging the credit score if you have access to lots of credit but don’t use it (and my first real job was as a credit manager).
You have a proven history of not spending more than you can afford, even though you could, therefore we trust you less to pay us back. 
Regards,
Shodan
Part of the reason people are confused about credit scores is that they read too much intention into the process. You’re looking for logic, but it isn’t logical. Much of it is purely statistical correlation. So the real thought process might be “Statistically, we see a correlation between [insert credit measure] and long-term credit worthiness.”
It’s all the difference between correlation and causation. Two things can be correlated without one causing the other.
I don’t believe that unpaid medical bills cause people to abandon their apartments. However, when I was an apartment manager, I did see a correlation - people with unpaid medical bills DID abandon their apartments more often. I don’t know why that would be true; it just was. After a few years, I became a pretty cold bastard when it came to credit reports… but you could see in the numbers that I was making better decisions.
(It may be worth noting that I didn’t pay much attention to the credit score itself. Instead, I looked for other specific details like bad checks, defaulted debt and frequent change of address).
Apparently, the magic number for balance to limit ratio is 25%.
One of the easiest things to do, is to get a credit card in someone’ eles’s name and continue for years to use it. You pay the minimum payment on it and keep charging. As you do this the credit card raises your limit, you pay the minimum.
So you’re John Doe at 123 Main Street.
John Smith steals your info sets up a credit card and forwards mail from 123 Main street to a PO box. He pays the minimum for 3 years gets lots of stuff, then just quits paying. BOOM you now owe $20,000 and this is the first you hear of it. If you don’t check your credit report, you’d never know you even have an open account.
A lot of this is done through ex-spouses (ex-lovers) or roommates.
Incredibly enough this is being done by parents and other relatives. It’s not unheard of for a kid to turn 18 and his social security card has been used to get a credit card by his father or mother or uncle or some other relative.
If I had known in the 70s how easy credit would be I would’ve gotten a bunch of social security numbers back when I got my first one. Back then no one check anything.
I was talking to the librarian and she said "It’s all too common for people to check a bunch of DVDs or CDs or expensive books out in their kid’s card and then never return them. OR even just open a card for their kid and the kid is so little he doesn’t know what he’s printing his name to. Then the kid tries to open a library card when he’s a teenager he can’t. (True the parent is responsible but the Chicago Library won’t restrict the parent card but rather the child’s card, even though they’ll bill the parent for the child’s card)
My wife says checking your credit score too much will ding your credit. No cite.
Your wife is (half) wrong. Checking your own credit report every day for 10 years won’t hurt anything (a soft inquiry), but having OTHER people check it to often (a hard inquiry) will hurt it. The reason is that when you go apply for a credit card and they run a credit report and see 10 other inquiries from other CC companies, they get worried that you might get approved for 10 cards all at once and suddenly have a lot of credit available, which you might not pay back.
Another thing that affects your credit is the duration of your accounts/lines of credit and also the the duration of your RESIDENCE. This has kind of screwed me over :mad:
I have a steady income, have a a mangeable balance on my credit card, pay all my bills on time, etc but I haven’t been able to get financing for mundane things (like a $1,000 television, or a Dell computer). I was surprised because my FICO score is decent (765) and found out why-
In the last four years, I have not lived in a single residence for even a year’s duration. I keep moving. I guess this makes me look like some criminal on the lam, but the reasons are generally outside of my control- rent a room in a house, plan on living there 5+ years, eight months later oops, they are putting the house up for sale, I have to find another place to live in a month’s time. As you could imagine, this happened quite a bit. What makes me pissed right now is that I might get laid off for work…THREE MONTHS after I just moved into a new place. Sure I could get by on savings and unemployment for a while, but any financial calamity would force me to move back with my folks…putting me right back in the “You have not lived in your place of residence long enough to be approved for financing” category :mad:
I don’t know how hard a car financer would laugh in my face if I tried to get an auto loan :mad: though I suppose I could simply save up a big down payment (like half or 2/3s the cost) of the car to buy it.
In the first commercial he sings about being stuck living in his parent’s basement because he married his girlfriend without knowing she had bad credit and so can’t get a real apartment.
But even if you haven’t done anything to nick your credit and you aren’t the victim of identity theft etc, credit isn’t negative and positive, it’s a scale. You can have a fairly low score from a lack of building good credit just as much as you can from getting bad credit. Of course in addition to your score there’s more specific information reported, but the score alone doesn’t tell the whole story.