What I’ve Learned, and Credit Reports 101

After all the problems we’ve had with Amazon and Chase Bank, detailed here and here, I have come to several conclusions.

1. Amazon.com customer service reps are generally polite, and willing to err on the side of the customer.
    
2. Amazon.com-affiliated businesses have customer service reps who are generally rude, give conflicting information, and do not care much one way or the other if they lose your business. In addition to the Chase Bank issues, I previously had a problem with a magazine subscription that my sister purchased from Amazon to give to me. I spent months trying to figure out what had happened to the subscription. The people managing the subscription services were not Amazon.com employees. My other sister also bought the same magazine subscription for me, but from a cheaper online place. I had no problems with her subscription for me.
    
3. In the future, I will only purchase directly from Amazon.com. To avoid any confusion, this means I will limit myself to purchasing books and CDs from them because it’s not worth my sanity to pore over the fine print on the Amazon website in an effort to figure out what Amazon actually handles and what they merely offer on behalf of a different merchant.
    
4. If you are a good person and pay up what you owe as soon as you find out you owe, say, $400, Chase Bank will still permanently close your account. If you are a college student who has trouble paying in full every month, and falls more and more behind in payments, Chase Bank will not only keep your account open, but increase your credit limit.
    
5. We will be getting rid of all credit cards we have, other than the American Express card (we get a cash rebate) and our bank’s Visa card (for the many places that don’t take Amex). Or rather, we will be getting rid of them once my husband reads this and understands that this is the only way I can keep myself from asking him, every day, to buy Chase Bank and shut it down. After this realization, we will then go through our credit reports and close any open account outside of those two cards.
    

Click “Read More” to find out about credit reports.

Here in the United States, everyone is entitled to receive one free credit report every year (more if you’ve had a stolen identity/fraud issue). Go to the website of Annual Credit Report, which is the officially-sanctioned site.

There are three credit bureaus - Experian, Transunion, and Equifax. The website above will give you access to reports from all three credit bureaus. The law allows you to get 1 credit report free from each bureau, each year. This means that you can actually check out your credit reports three times a year. What you do is order a credit report from Experian in, say, January. Then order one, still from Annualcreditreport.com, from Transunion in May. Then get the Equifax report in September. This way you can keep an eye on possible identify theft, because although the three credit reports contain slightly different information, they’ll all show the major transactions as well as who has requested a credit check on you.

Once you have a credit report, make sure the information is accurate. One of my early reports listed me as having lived at Chris’s house in Billerica, although I never lived there, even temporarily. Another listed me as having an account with my father, which was a surprise to me, since the credit card in question was one that I had used for emergencies in college. I had thought my account had been cancelled when I stopped using it, promptly after graduation. That I was still on his account was a surprise to my father, also.

If you find inaccurate information, you will be provided with a link or phone number to address the issues with the credit bureau. In some cases, you will have to go directly to the credit card company/bank/loan holder in order to get the discrepancies straightened out.

For example, if Macy’s has you listed as having an open credit card account and you have no idea where this card is, nor do you want a Macy’s card, you should contact Macy’s first and have them close the account and send you a letter stating that the account has been closed.

Keep in mind, though, that if you close open credit card accounts (and by open, I mean that you own the card, and not necessarily whether you use it or not), your credit score may go down a little bit. The credit scores are based on a ratio of how much credit you are using against how much credit you have available (which would include the credit limits on unused credit cards).

My personal feeling is that I’d rather lose a little in credit scores than have to worry about cards lying around that I’d forgotten I had. It takes some time to go through the credit reports, and Chris always thought I was overly paranoid to keep checking our reports, but that’s why we’re married. I worry too much, he worries not enough, but at any given point, one of us is generally right, and the team wins anyway.

Posted by: ssjane | March 24, 2007 | 8:47 pm
Posted in: Rants