Reading Reports for Comparison....

[Anonymous]

There are significant discrepancies in my scores acroos the three CRA and all FICO models. I started attempting to compare and decide if anything needed to be disputed, updated, etc…but where to start?

Each CRA uses their own language in comments, they don’t have the same dates or payment information recorded, and they don’t even report the same number of accounts. All of the baddies are there…usually one “complete” record and two that have the name, balance, and number of day’s late but all other data is missing.

Is there rhyme or reason to what exactly needs to be the same?? Based on what I am seeing…I don’t know where to start.

Thanks- 

Nik

[Anonymous]

I’m a rookie and learning myself, just wanted to say hang in there.....someone much more knowledgeable will hopefully be along soon to help.  Good luck!

[thornback]

Paper reports.  Contact all 3 bureaus and request hard-copy reports be mailed to you.  Hard-copies are much more thorough than web-based reports and usually show the (raw) data that's incomplete or missing online.  Many times when data is missing online, it's due to the user-interface being unable to pull & correctly read the raw data. 

It's also easier to read and compare on paper. 

Once you do that & review them, come back and let us know the types of discrepancies you find and we can advise how best to handle them (ignore, bureau dispute, or direct dispute). 

You can also pull your reports from annualcreditreport.com, for free.  These reports can be generated as a pdf and very closely resemble your paper reports.