As business owners and property owners, do you have a clean credit record? Do you know what the banks & financial institutions will see when you go for your next loan? Would you know immediately if someone unauthorised applied for credit on your behalf? If you’ve moved and have missed some payments on regular utility bills, do you know if they have recorded a black mark against your credit record?
Is it worth spending some time on protecting your credit rating? Let’s have a look at how long things can last on your credit report & rating (from the Equifax Australia website):
- Any credit enquiry is held on your file for five years
- Overdue accounts listed as a payment default and clearouts are held for five years
- Overdue accounts listed as a “Serious Credit Infringement” are held for seven years
- Writs and summons are held for four years
- Identity information, which includes name, date of birth, gender, driver’s licence, and address history, is held for the life of the credit file
There are inexpensive ways to help guard yourself against a bad credit rating, offered by Equifax.
According to the Cybercrime and Fraud Report Annual Research Report 2017, more than 1 in 5 Australians have been impacted by identity theft. We have had this happen to a couple of clients in the last 2 years and it has caused them immense stress and hardship.
Once a year if you’re eligible, you can order a free Equifax Credit Report. The report shows you what lenders can see when you go for a loan. It can help highlight issues that you are unaware of, which in many cases can be fixed before you apply for a loan. It helps you know where you stand, and can help you improve your credit profile. For $4.95 per month. you can subscribe to get a credit report per year, Credit Alerts, Identity Watch, and Identity Guard Insurance, and there are other subscriptions which will check each quarter or each month.
If you think this is too much to pay to protect your credit record, think of one poor client, whose mobile account was stolen, a new iphone ordered, the address changed and the iphone picked up in a totally different state, before the theft was discovered. Or another who bought a very small amount of bitcoin, and their identity was stolen with $200K stolen from their bank accounts. Or another client who went for a car loan and only realised that a $300 recorded debt default was sitting on her credit report when the finance company pointed it out and refused to give her the car loan until she’d cleared it. Or one of my family members, who didn’t realise, when you apply for a ‘5 year interest fee terms’ offer from a major retailer, that they would record a $10,000 credit facility in their name, picked up in a recent loan application. The $10,000 credit facility was still sitting there, even though the card had not been used in 10 years, long after the original purchase was paid off.
Credit reports are important. It can be a scary world with hackers, scammers, phishers and other cybercrime perpetrators, but there are ways to protect your credit rating, and your hard-earned assets. Definitely worth a discussion at least, with your family.
Note:
The writer does not receive any financial gain from Equifax, but is a subscriber to Equifax’s alert service.
