Finance Blog

The three major credit reporting agency’s are allowed to sell your information to people. This could be sold to anyone from catalog companies, to debt collection business’s or 100 other companies you don’t want to have your information. Unless you tell them you don’t want your information to be sold they’re not asking you if they can. You must tell them you don’t want it sold. An added benift to stopping them from selling your information is you get a lot less junk mail.

These are the steps you need to take to stop them from selling your information:
Call 1-888-5OPT OUT and tell them you don’t want your information sold. Please check out http://www.ftc.gov/privacy/protect.shtm which has more information on the number and what the credit agency’s are doing with your information.

Having good credit is a necessity in today’s world. Having and keeping good credit isn’t as easy as it seems for a lot of people. With the slow economy and people losing their jobs at abnormally high rates people are living on credit cards.

The first thing everyone should do is take advantage of getting a copy of their credit report from each of the three major credit reporting agencies at www.annualcreditreport.com which is free once a year. Avoid Freecreditreport.com because they’re only *free* for a limited time and then they start charging you money, then it’s not really free is it?

Once you get your report’s back from the agency’s look them over carefully for errors or strange things. If you happen to find something that isn’t suppose to be there, is really old, or flat out wrong let them know. You have the right to dispute everything that you feel is incorrect on the report. It is up to the credit reporting agency to prove you’re wrong and they are right. A lot of times you can have a lot of things removed which will help see a big bump in your credit score. You can dispute items right from each of the credit reporting sites, or you can mail them a letter telling them you’ve got incorrect information you wanted to be removed.

Here is how you could format a letter to a credit reporting agency to prove it should be there:

Credit Reporting Agency
11111 blah blah street
Some place, USA

To whom it may concern,

Please provide evidence that the following account belongs on my report and that my rights have not been abrogated.
In the event that none exists, please delete this damaging account.

Account Name, Account ********

Your Name,
Your Address
(Your report or confirmation number if you have it here)

Sample letter if you have something listed that isn’t yours:

Credit Reporting Agency
1111 blah blah street
Some place, USA

Dear Credit Reporting Agency,

Please delete the following account from my credit report, as it is not mine:

Account Name, Account ******

Your Name,
Your Address
(Your report or confirmation number if you have it here)