Protect Your Good Credit

Many people believe, mistakenly, that the credit bureaus in this country are some type of consumer-service provider or regulatory agency. They control many aspects of our daily existence. Most people don’t even realize the extent of the bureaus’ influence. You can’t buy a car, a house, get a credit card, get insurance, rent an apartment and sometimes even get a job, without you, a business or service provider paying the credit bureaus.

Credit bureaus are simply big businesses and their business isn’t about managing your credit score, it’s about selling information and marketing services. They tap every scrape of information about you and then they sell it over and over again. The real kicker in all this? WE PAY FOR IT!

Every time you apply for credit, insurance, etc. the provider is paying the bureaus for your report. That cost is passed on to you one way or another. Then we pay for the credit bureaus to “monitor”, “protect” or “update” our credit. We pay them to correct mistakes on our reports. We pay them to be able to review our own credit.

Next, there are the marketing companies that pay the credit bureaus for the ability to access our personal history so they can sell us more stuff or extend more offers of credit. There are credit reporting companies that provide tri-merge credit reports to all types of businesses. The credit bureaus charge the companies and then the reporting companies charge the businesses. The bureaus charge government agencies such as Fannie Mae for credit information and Fannie Mae then charges the lenders that utilize their automated underwriting systems.

Indeed, this is capitalism at is very best or very worse, depending on your prospective.

Wake up, people, you need to realize how much this is costing you and every other consumer in this country. Unless these businesses are going to be regulated like other government monitored monopolies, we are never going to have control over our own personal information and we’ll never be free of the risk of having our identity stolen. It’s time to end our over-dependence on credit and, therefore, the credit bureaus. If we must have them, then they must provide appropriate and consistent consumer service and protection without the repetitive price tag to us.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 28th, 2005 at 3:49 pm and is filed under RANTS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.