Establishing credit and maintaining your creditworthiness are essential to your financial well-being. Good credit allows you to obtain loans and acquire assets that you otherwise might not be able to...

Establishing credit and maintaining your creditworthiness are essential to your financial well-being. Good credit allows you to obtain loans and acquire assets that you otherwise might not be able to attain. This project will help you to examine your credit.

If you’ve already established credit, get a copy of your credit report from one of the credit bureaus mentioned in this chapter. (If you’ve applied for a loan recently, your lender may already have sent you a copy of your credit report.) Carefully examine your report for any inaccuracies, and take the necessary steps to correct them. Then look over your report and evaluate your creditworthiness. If you feel you need to improve your creditworthiness, what steps do you need to take?

If you haven’t yet established credit, find an application for a card such as Visa, MasterCard, or a department store or gasoline company credit card. Places to look might be at a department store, banking institution, gas station, or the Internet. Take the application home and fill it out. Then look it over and try to do a self-evaluation of your creditworthiness. Based on the information that you’ve provided, do you think you would qualify for the credit card? What do you see as your major strengths? What are your major weaknesses? Is there anything you can do about them?