Your credit report contains all information regarding your financial health. It is the report that is being looked at by the creditor everytime you apply for a loan. Hence it becomes important for you to learn to analyze your report. The credit report can be divided into the following sections.

Personal information: This section serves the purpose of identification; contains your name, alias, address, current and previous employers and SSN (Social Security Number). It may so happen that you find more than one spelling of your name. That is because it has been reported that way by the creditor.

Payment history: This section would contain information regarding the type of accounts both revolving and/or otherwise, names of the creditors and most importantly your payment pattern. This section is the most important part of your report because this is the part the creditors would look into. You may find the following categories listed in it.

• Creditors names: This section would list out the lenders, the credit card companies, banks, mortgage and auto loan lenders , who are reporting your payment history to the credit bureaus.
• Account number: Of course, the account numbers would be listed beside the creditors. You may have more than one account with a certain creditor. This section would also list the nature of the account, such as-
  

  I – Individual
  U – Undesignated
  J – Joint
  A –Authorized user
  S – Shared

• Account details: The account detail section would include information like,
  

  Date when the account was opened
  Status of the account- open, revolving, installment etc.
  Delinquencies
  Derogatory/ charge-offs
  Balance
  Credit limit
  Terms for installment loans and
  Period reviewed in the report

• Collection activities: Next which comes in line is information regarding collection activities. This section lists out the accounts that have been with the collection agencies and reported by them to the credit reporting agencies over 7 years.
• Public information: This section comprises of the those items which can cause the most damage to your financial future. It contains information on bankruptcy, judgment and liens. So, you may take utmost care to keep this section clean.
• Credit inquiries: The credit report also includes information on credit inquiries. There are 2 types of inquiries visible on your report.
  

  1. Hard inquiries - Inquiries that are made by creditors with whom you have applied for loans.
  2. Soft inquiries - These are made by companies that want to send you promotional information or pre approved offers.

You may be have heard that too many inquiries within a short period affect your score negatively but it mayn’t happen always. In fact the FICO doesn’t take into consideration many of these inquiries made. Also, multiple inquires made within a 14-day period would be considered as one inquiry. Hence, you might not have to worry too much about the inquiries made by lenders.

With changes in the law, every consumer can now ask for one free credit report from all the three reporting agencies once a year. The centralized source to obtain credit report is www.annualcreditreport.com . You can also request the same from the credit bureaus directly. You may get reports from all the three agencies to compare the information since any one report mayn’t contain all information; this is because not all creditors would report your credit information to the same bureau.

Click here to view sample credit reports.