In many cases people believe that if a credit card company or other lender looks at your credit report that company is merely looking to see your credit score and, while this is definitely one of the things that they do look at, they are in fact looking at a great deal more. In particular, they are looking at the amount of debt you have compared to your income and even reasonably small accounts, like those with a mail order company, will be considered as an income deduction when considering an application for a loan.

If a credit card company or other lender considers that you have less money coming in than you have going out then your loan request will automatically be turned down. Actually, the law requires that a certain percentage of your income must be available to meet loan payments before the lender is allowed to approve it, whatever the purpose of the loan.

Lenders are also looking at your credit history for the last seven years to see how well you have managed loans in existence during that period. In particular, they are looking at whether you have made payments on time and will play close attention to any payments which you made more than thirty days late. It might not have seemed particularly important to you at the time that you ran into a few problems and were late making payments for several months on one of your accounts, however a new lender is certainly going to take this into account when assessing the risk of lending to you now.

Lenders will also see whether any of your accounts have run into debt during the past seven years and whether or not these debts have now been paid. If there are payments outstanding on a current agreement credit card companies and other lenders will be very wary when it comes to extending you additional credit before these are cleared.

Finally, your credit report will show whether you have filed for bankruptcy, in most cases in the last ten years. A few people believe that a company is far more likely to advance you credit if you have filed for bankruptcy because they have the added protection of knowing that you are not permitted to file again for a number of years. This however is not the case and filing for bankruptcy is seen as a red warning flag by the finance and credit card companies showing that you have already shown a tendency for getting yourself in over your head when managing your money.

Your credit report is an important document and one which you ought not only to understand but which you ought to review occasionally for your own protection and peace of mind. Happily, the law requires that you be furnished with a copy of your personal credit report once each year if you request it and the first thing that you should acquaint yourself with is how to obtain your free annual credit report. Once you have received your report you then have to look through it carefully to ensure that it is accurate and to ask for it to be changed if it is not. Furthermore, there are some instances in which it is possible to ask for alterations to your personal credit report, even if it is correct, and here you need to have the answers to hand for such questions as how can I remove a judgment from my credit report?