As I mentioned earlier, I submit an offer to lease an apartment last night. This morning I got a call asking if I had a copy of my credit report on hand. The report I could find for free, but not so much for the score. So I went and got one of my free credit scores for the year, and reviewed it once more before sending it off. I didn’t find any errors, but I tried pulling myself back and seeing it as a stranger would look at it.

While I don’t have any late payments, there are a few things that bother me about my credit report:

1) Not that much history. Its better than it was when I first got out of college, but its still under 10 years (closer to 6?). My “average” account is 3 years old.

2) The sheer number of accounts. I have 15 listed. Sure, half of them are closed student loans from when I consolidated, but if someone didn’t know what they were looking at they might have to ask themselves WHY I have so many loans. (I would hope my young age and profession would kinda be a clue, but you never know.)

3) Most of my accounts have ridiculously low “high balances”, but one just makes me look bad. Out of $8,000 I had a balance of $3,500. That was my old business credit card, and while I paid that bill way before it was due, it still showed up. (That’s what inspired me to start paying my card weekly, although I admit that was a bit extremist.) Sure, if someone looked at the rest of my cards ($800 high balance against a $12,000 limit, or $400 high balance against $10,000) they’d realize I’m not irresponsible. Plus I’ve never had a late payment.

4) Brand spanking new car loan. Well, whatever….its just $12k (haha, “just”?), but it did cause my credit score to drop close to 20 points, according to Credit Karma, so it kinda pisses me off.

Anyway, I’m hoping that my excessive number of loans don’t discourage the unit owners. I’m assuming that if they’re novices at reviewing credit reports someone will be leading them through it (and that person will realize that I’m a responsible borrower!). Although I have heard about law school grads getting rejected on all sorts of things because of student loans. [sigh]

 

By the way, and this isn’t a sponsored post by Credit Karma (lol), but I really recommend using their site, if only for their “report card” feature. They go over the different aspects that are used to calculate a score and your “grade” for each section. They even have a section where you can try to predict your new score based on different factors! Like if you get a new credit card, or a new loan. (They’re actually about 8 points lower than they predicted I’d have with my car loan. Not too far off, I guess.) The scary part is that they ask for your social, so use it at your own discretion.