Can Other People Lower My Credit Score?

A credit score can be critical to your personal finances. It determines whether you will get a loan, and the interest rates on the loans you get. It may be the difference between finding a nice house to rent, and applying fruitlessly again and again without success. Still, few people understand credit scores and what goes into them, and still fewer know how they can affect them.

A smart individual works as hard as he can to ensure that heas got a good credit rating. But you may wonder, is my credit controlled by anyone other than me? Unfortunately, it can be. But donat worry, because there are steps you can take to erase othersa black marks from your credit score.

Credit bureaus keep a lot of information on file, and this information is summarized as a number. This number is a credit score. The most commonly used one, the FICO score, is the sum of three such scores from three different credit bureaus. To find out what your FICO score is, you can use the myfico service.

Credit scores are never static. They are always evolving as your account and credit information changes. Your net amount of debt, as well as the types of debts youare carrying and your history of past credit payments, play a significant role in your score. The longevity of your credit also is important.

The most critical issue is your payment history, as it impacts your credit score the most. One of the ways in which other people can damage your credit is if a company wrongly reports that you are delinquent in making on-time payments. This is more common that you would believe, and it can be a real fight to fix the damage done.

People who have had this happen to them know that a single mistake in the information a company reports can cause them years of hassle. It takes lots of time and frustration to finally get the wrong information corrected so your credit score gets back to where it is supposed to be. The good news is that you have the law on your side, and most issues like this eventually come down in the customeras favor.

Check your credit report. If your score is a lot lower than you expected, you should check if a credit bureau has incorrect information about your financial profile. Youall usually already know if they problem is misinformation about payments, but the incorrect information could be coming from other sources and causing your score to be low.

So to answer the question of whether others can negatively impact your credit score, the answer is mixed. They can by making a mistake, but if you are vigilant and take the time and effort to correct those mistakes you can get your credit back to its rightful place.