Credit Report

My Credit Report In Advance

Have you ever run across someone that is obsessed with staying young? This is the type of person that spends a great deal of time trying products, procedures and researching healthy ways to live. My experience with this kind of person is that they are so busy trying not to age that their life passes them by. I have also found that they are not the most fun people to be around.

As I near retirement I have made plans for my retirement years that allow me to have as much fun as possible. I am not going to spend my time fretting about time passing, I am going to try to enjoy as many minutes of my life as I can. In order to do this I have made investments through the years and have paid my bills in a timely fashion. I decided that I should check my credit report to make sure that everything was in order. I was planning on buying a second condominium in another part of the country so that I could travel between two homes. I have one home in the northern states so I wanted a second home in an area with a warmer climate to spend my winter months. I knew that the first thing a realtor would ask me would be questions about my financial situation. I thought if I had a copy of my credit report we could move ahead quickly.

I was very thankful that I had run my credit report in advance. There were two huge mistakes on it. I have a very common last name. I had two outstanding loans on my report that belonged to someone else with my same name. As I have gotten older I have been very diligent about using my full middle name on my legal documents; however I was not very good at doing this when I was younger. A person with my same first and last name as well as middle initial had an outstanding student loan at a private university. The loan was for a substantial amount of money. I did not get my degree from this university; however I had taken a few continuing education classes there. The classes that I had taken were paid for in cash. I called the accounting office of the university and asked them to look into the loan situation that was placed on my record. After several minutes on hold and several questions about my previous addresses I was informed that this had been a huge mistake on the part of the university. They promised to write letters to clear my credit rating and to make sure that the correct person was billed for the loan. It took several months for my credit report to come back accurate.

There are several reasons why we should check our credit report on a regular basis. One of the reasons is that nowadays indentity fraud is very prevalent and one way to check if something is going amiss with your finances is by checking your credit report. It is quite easy to get hold of a credit report online in this day and age, so there are no excuses for not being aware of your credit report.