Who Are You?
Your credit report has a section that contains personal information about you. Don't worry, it's not
Your name
Your date of birth
Your Social Security Number
Your current and previous employers
Your current and previous residence addresses
There might be a few other pieces of information in there, such as phone numbers and information about your spouse.
You might be surprised at what you learn about yourself as you read through this section. Perhaps there are Social Security Numbers that you didn't know existed, or misspellings of your name. You should try and get everything corrected, but you might not have much luck. Even an erroneous Social Security Number often sticks. The reason? The credit-reporting companies do not want to fix something that they think is not broken. If they start using the correct SSN, they will lose all of that good information from your old SSN. Therefore, you should first try to get it fixed with whatever creditor is reporting with the wrong number.
All of the information in this section came from somewhere. Most of it came from information you gave your lenders when you applied for a loan. When they ask “Who do you work for?” you tell them who your employer is. Next thing you know, it shows up on your credit reports. The same thing goes for your residence history.
The first section might also contain a Consumer Statement. This is a statement that you add to your credit reports, typically to explain the less-flattering items within your report. You might mention that you had a bankruptcy because of a medical emergency, and you can hope that lenders will take this information into account. Truth be told, these statements probably do not add much value. First, automated credit-scoring models do not consider the statement because they can't understand the words, they just crunch numbers. Second, if you are going to have a human lender read your credit reports anyway, you will probably have the chance to explain any blemishes to that person, because you'll be sitting across the desk from them.
Your personal information in this section is what gets used when data is merged from a variety of sources. In other words, your Social Security Number might be the common link among various creditors, and between credit-reporting companies. Since different organizations have different borrowing information, it's important that they are able to merge everything correctly.
