Is your credit report important? There are a lot of people who
would not consider their credit rating as something too
important to them in their life. There are others who, while
recognising its importance, would not be overly concerned about
the issue or understand the reasons for its importance. Well, to
those people, they should at least be aware of some of the uses
that are made of credit reports in the world in which we live.
While it may seem obvious to state it, credit reports are
predominantly concerned with assessing the risk involved in
lending money to you. Lenders are obsessed with one thing,
getting repaid, and their entire industry revolves around making
this occur. Therefore, they have developed the credit score that
will assess your likely hood of repaying them and this is then
used to either approve or reject your application for credit.
While this is the basic purpose, some more sophisticated lenders
desire to get in on an ever larger share of the market and in
order to lend to higher risk borrowers, they create different
categories of loans which people with lower scores can qualify
for. These loans will invariably have higher interest rates and
other less favourable conditions and this will be the price you
pay for having a lower credit rating.
Since loans are used to finance homes, education, cars, and most
other large purchases in life, the inability to get access to
credit, or only to be able to get it at less attractive terms
and rates, is a substantially reason to care about your credit
report and try to keep it in as good a condition as possible.
Credit reports are also used when you apply for renting or
leasing accommodation. This is usually because the landlord
wants to be fairly certain that you'll be able to pay your rent
as it falls due. So keeping your credit score healthy at this
stage will pay off if you need to be approved for renting or
leasing residential property.
There is also a trend among employer to start using credit
ratings when assessing job applicants. The reasons they are
making use of credit reports are of course different for every
employer but there is a consensus that a healthy credit report
and a good past record of meeting financial commitments is a
good sign that the job applicant is someone reliable and worth
employing. While it does seem slightly perverse that the very
people that will need a job the most are precisely the ones that
can be denied it but that's the direction things are moving in.
About the author:
Joseph Kenny is the webmaster of the UK credit card comparison
site http://www.creditcards121.co
m/, where you can find a selection of credit card
advice. For US visitors there is also the comparison site http://www.credit-cards-i
nfo.com/ for all US interest free offers.
Written by: Joseph Kenny
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