How to check your credit history
These days every one is lending money, selling insurance, and providing other services through companies that ten years ago would have be completely unknown. For instance when you go to the supermarket and get your shopping you can now apply for a loan or car insurance. The post office, banks, building societies, phone and cable companies all offer loans these days and we can’t turn on the TV or Radio without having some sort of financial service being served to us on a plate, and more of us are taking of advantage of this too with the average Britain owing around £6000 each and the total public British borrowings up to over 7billion.
So with all this borrowing going it's understandable that lenders and creditors alike want to be in the know about who they can trust to lend money to and who is going to pay it back on time. There is a system for this in the form of a national credit report.
Every time you apply for credit of any kind it is likely that your prospective lender will call upon your national credit report to check whether you have had any black marks placed against your name. These "black marks" can be caused by missed payments, credit refusals, defaults or multiple credit applications within a short period. Any credit searches carried out will also be stored in the file creating a national scoring system for use by creditors in the UK.
Your credit report consists of:
- Your National Credit Score: A number ranging from 0-1000... a higher score generally indicates that lenders will consider it less risky to grant you credit.
- Your National Credit Score category which will be excellent, good, fair, poor or very poor
- Credit searches carried out against your name
There are also a number of other factors which may or may not effect your credit rating. Such as:
- Moving address recently or frequently: Lenders prefer borrowers who have been at a single address for 3 years or more.
- Multiple Credit applications: If you have applied for credit a frequently with a short period lenders may be put off by this.
Credit can also be adversely affected by where you live. If the previous owner was financially black listed, filed for bankruptcy or was involved in credit fraud and their name is still registered at your property you may have problems gaining credit. You can revert this effect by making sure that you are up to date on the national electoral register. The only reason why this may be a problem is if you happen to have the same surname and there could be seen to be some kind of association between you and the previous occupant, the chances of this happening are rare but it can and has happened in the past.
For a small fee you can check your credit report using websites such as CreditExpert, Experian, and Equifax. Using these sites you can check your credit history is accurate and up to date, and monitor credit searches carried out against your name.
If you are looking to check your credit history right away CreditExpert are currently offering a 30-day trial on their website that enables you to see your credit report and credit history
Your credit history is one of the most deciding factors lenders will use when deciding whether to lend you money, what interest rates you qualify for and on what terms. So be careful when you borrow money and make sure you can afford it as rebuilding your credit history can take years.
Click here to check your credit report for free
