Articles for Everybody

Although many people do not realize it, whenever someone sends a request for a copy of your credit report for review, this query is documented and has a role in determining your score. This is true of all queries, regardless of whether or not you are really going around applying for a lot of loans. People in the act of moving to a new home frequently run into this problem as their landlord, their utility companies, their telecommunications provider, and others may all request copies of your credit report at around the same time.

The problem is that when many queries are made about your credit report, it is implied that you are actively applying for multiple loans from multiple lenders. Further, if the process continues, it also implies that you have applied for and then been rejected for multiple loans. These queries are reported as a negative on your credit report and may adversely affect your score. Therefore it is important to keep track of who is asking for your credit report and why. This does not include your own queries as part of your fast credit repair project.

One strategy to help avoid problems in this respect is to try to cover all loan applications or other actions likely to result in a credit report query confined to brief periods of time. Sometime – though not always – if multiple queries are made within the same two or three days, the credit reporting agency will lump all the queries together into one, which obviously looks better.  This makes it much easier to fix credit fast.

If you cannot limit the number of queries being made, another possible idea is to add a consumer statement to your credit report explaining that these queries were not related to loan applications, but due to some other reason. Section 611(b) of the Fair Credit Reporting Act allows anyone to add a brief consumer statement to their credit report in order to explain or clarify the reasons for this or that item being reported. Using a consumer statement to explain the multiple queries will not affect your credit score, but will help potential lenders understand why there have been so many queries once the report is reviewed by a person.

Related Posts:

• A Poor Credit Score is Not the End of the World