Personal Information

• Your credit files list your name and any variations or aliases you use for financial business. For example, if you are a married woman, your records contain your married and maiden names. Credit files also disclose your telephone number, even if it is unlisted, and your current and previous addresses and employers, according to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse website. Your date of birth and Social Security Number are also included.
  
  

Credit Information

• Every open credit-related account, including loans and credit cards, appears in your files. Negative data on open accounts gets erased in seven years, according to the Federal Trade Commission. If you closed some accounts while they were in good standing, they show up for ten years. TransUnion, Equifax and Experian all show your account opening dates, credit limits, current balances, payment dates and other related data. They indicate whether accounts were charged off and turned over to debt collections. The three agencies also report information gleaned from public records, like court judgments for bad debts, bankruptcies, vehicle repossessions and home foreclosures.
  
  

Purpose

• TransUnion, Equifax and Experian make a profit selling your credit files to creditors and insurers processing applications and to employers screening potential hires. They also sell prescreened data about you to finance companies, credit card issuers and others who wish to send marketing materials to people who meet certain criteria, the FTC site advises. Credit scorers like FICO plug data from your files into scoring formulas and sell the results to lenders like mortgage companies.
  
  

Control

• You cannot directly control what goes into your credit files, although you strongly influence it with your employment and residence choices and the way you handle credit. You can monitor the data by getting free file copies every year through annualcreditreport.com and forcing the reporting agencies to fix whatever mistakes you find. TransUnion, Equifax and Experian allow you to dispute errors (see Resources), and federal law obligates them to check with the creditors and correct your files within 30 days.