Being aware of your credit file

Hi all

With all the newcomers that are posting lately, thought I'd share a bit of knowledge/awareness I've gained in the past couple of weeks.

You may or may not be aware that any time you apply for credit (eg a home loan, a car lease, delayed payment furniture…) or fail to pay a bill on time, an entry appears on your credit file.  And your credit file is looked at when applying for a property loan.  Needless to say, if there are dubious entries, it can make it hard to get a loan.

For this reason, it is a good idea to be aware of the state of your credit file.  You can get a free copy if you can wait 10 days, or you can pay if you require it more urgently.  For a small fee, you can even subscribe to receive alerts when a new entry appears on your credit file.  This is considered particularly useful to ward off cases of identity fraud. 

This is the link for where  you can get a copy of your credit file:
http://www.mycreditfile.com.au/

I discovered that on two occasions when I had a conversation with a bank about maybe acquiring some property with their finance, but did not proceed to application and did not authorise them to hit my credit file, they did so anyway.  So I had two entries on my credit file for "Mortgage Application" that were not nicely stamped "Approved".  Needless to say this does not look great and I was furious!  It has taken almost 2 weeks just to get the bank to call me back and agree that they need to arrange for the entries to be removed… and it will take the credit file people another 5 days to remove the entries once they receive the request from the bank to do so.  So all in all, this is a turnaround of at least 3 weeks. 

Thought I'd share his knowledge with you so that you can:
1. Be aware of your credit file, and how to keep an eye on it
2. Be aware of what the naughty bank might be up to, so you can be clear in telling them during ANY conversation that you do NOT authorise them to hit your credit file as a result of the conversation.
3. Not get into a situation where you are ready to buy a property immediately only to find you have annoying entries in your credit file that will take weeks to clear.

Cheers all