Transunion is one of the three major credit bureaus. They are
required by the FACT Act to provide a free annual Transunion
Credit Report to anyone who requests it. Transunion has been
around since 1968 and is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois.
The FACT Act (Fair Credit Reporting Act) was created in 2003 to
insure individuals had access to any credit history reported by
the three major credit bureaus. The legislation has been amended
several times since 2003, the latest being June of 2008. You can
request your free Transunion Credit Report from www.annualcreditreport.com.
You can learn more about your free yearly credit report here: Yearly
Free Credit Report.
When you go through the annualcreditreport.com website to the
Transunion website, you will be asked for your basic information
to identify yourself like your name, ssan, current address, and
prior address if at current for less than two years. You will then
be taken to a security section where they will use several
questions that only you would know about information contained in
your credit history. Very simple and usually something you would
know anyway like account numbers or specific lenders.
Your credit score is not provided with your Transunion Credit
Report. They do offer your credit score for an additional cost and
have several programs that you can sign up for to monitor and
receive instant updates to your credit history file. I'm not sure it's worth the cost, but
that's up to you to decide. If you've had problems with identity
theft (or think you are at risk), it certainly would be worth the
extra cost.
Once you have completed the gauntlet of extra offers, your
Transunion Credit Report is displayed. The first that struck me
was that they had ads for credit cards and other vendors on the
report page. In fact all three might have a blatant offer of their
own services but Transunion is the only one that offers up credit
card offers.
No real explanation or small talk, the information starts right
into the individual sections. The sections are as follows:
- Personal Information
- Public Information
- Account Information
- Adverse Accounts
- Satisfactory Accounts
- Regular Inquires
- Promotional Inquires
- Contact Information for Transunion
- Consumer Rights
They use a color coding that lets you see at a glance whether
satisfactory accounts are current. All current entries are green,
30-120 day late payments show in different shades of orange. So obviously
you want to see all green on your reports.
Adverse accounts don't always use a color code, just state the
lender and the problem in easy to understand terms. If you see
information that is not accurate, this does give you a good
reference to make a dispute against. Dates, lender contact
information, and event is clearly stated.
In my case I check my credit reports every year to see what new
entries are there and if any information stated is incorrect. I've
had no activity this year so everything should be correct. Not so
with Transunion I'm sorry to say. Nothing major but they still
don't have addresses and employment information correct. But they
aren't "adverse" so I'm not to concerned.
There are three areas you may want to spend a little time on
reviewing. Make sure your personal information such as address,
name, etc. is all current. The adverse section should be double
checked to see if any lender has put negative information that is
incorrect. If you do dispute any negative information, make sure
you provide the proper reference information (you can do this
easily online).
An area that is important that some forget is the satisfactory
section. If you have some positive credit transactions that are
not listed, you should request the lender to report the
positive information. You can never have too much good credit
history.
You can also check up on who has accessed your credit history
for promotional or actual credit inquiries. Any time you apply for
insurance, utilities, even cable service the vendor may access
your credit history. Normally they have informed you (remember all
the fine print on the application?) and by the act of applying
have agreed to this procedure.
Over all the Transunion Credit Report was accurate and concise.
In fact the Transunion credit report was the shortest of the three
major credit bureaus (12 pages versus 18 and 25 for the other
two). Nothing was left off, it just was more compact each page. Of
course everyone can have more or less credit history to report
which impacts the length of any report.
The feedback we have received from visitors and comments from
other sources have never been negative in the updating process for
Transunion, both disputes and other information. Their credit
history records are straight to the point a little dressing. Other
than maybe the advertisements on the first page.
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