It probably comes as no surprise to most people that “somewhere” there is a credit report on them that knows everything they ever did, good and bad, financially. Unfortunately, this is where their knowledge stops though, and not knowing the real scoop about how this really works is actually hurting them.

There are three companies that keep track of your financial and credit history, which are Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax. They know more about you than you think or perhaps are even comfortable with, but that’s what it is. They compete with each other so they do not share information between them. Some lenders report to one of them every month, other lenders report to another one, and large financial obligations like your mortgage probably report to two of them or even all three.

But it gets even more complex. Again, they are in business to make a profit, so they want to get as many lenders reporting to them as possible. As such, they have “specials” to entice lenders to come to them, so Mastercard may have report to Experian last year but now reports to TransUnion, Discover reported to Equifax last year and now reports to Experian, and so on. This change occurs all the time on a regular basis.

With this background information, are you starting to see where the problem occurs? First of all, there is not any single credit reporting agency that knows the WHOLE credit story behind you. Moreover, when Visa reported that overdue account last year and now is reporting to another company, that original company keeps on reporting that overdue account because the information is never corrected.

Research and studies have found that a majority, a large majority of the US population have errors in their credit reports with one or more of these three agencies. The overall impact of these errors is that when the credit bureau calculates your credit score, it is almost certainly lower than it should really be. This in turn means that you are not getting the best interest rate on your credit cards, car loans, and mortgage, and this can also have similar negative effects in other parts of your financial life.

The only way this ever gets resolved is if you dispute it. There are right ways and wrong ways to dispute inaccurate information, because there are a lot of people who are disputing negative information that really is accurate in the hopes that it will just go away. This is an unfortunate fact for consumers who are trying to get truly incorrect information corrected or removed from their credit reports.

There is no sense in having inaccurate information about you being reported as accurate and factual. Get it corrected, and this is something you can do yourself, where you do not need to spend money on a “credit fix”. This is entirely legal, and is indeed your responsibility. You are only hurting yourself if you don’t get this done.