My son and his wife are entering an exciting phase of life. They are going to have twins. They have waited four years to start their family and now they are going to have two babies. They are very excited and a little overwhelmed at the same time. They wanted to wait to have children until they were both secure in their jobs and financially set. They have paid off their student loans and are starting to look for a home. They were planning to wait a while to move to a house, however having twins is speeding up that process because their apartment will not be big enough for the four of them.

They were excited about meeting with a realtor. They went to the bank to fill out loan applications so that they would be prior approved for a mortgage. I was surprised when our son called us and said the credit report came back with blemishes on it. There were several outstanding accounts in my son’s name. At first the bank thought someone had stolen his identity, however we have a very common surname and it seems that mistakes were made in the billing department at the university. His student loan payments had been credited to another person’s account. The university recognized the mistake and was going to correct it, but while this occurred the ability to get prior approved for a mortgage loan was going to be placed on hold. When I heard this I decided that I better check my credit report as well as my retirement account because their were two other women that had the same first and last name that I have working in my field. I am always careful to include my middle initial in all my documents.

I went on a popular site to check my credit report. I had talked with a friend of ours that is a banker and he suggested running the credit reports separately for myself and my husband and then one jointly. He said he always advises couples to do this so they know if one or the other has to establish a better rating. I was surprised when my credit report came back that I had an outstanding student loan for a university that I never attended. The loan was for over twenty thousand dollars and had been taken out ten years after I had my degree, from a different college. I called the university and set up an appointment to meet with the accounting department. I took my identifications with me and met with the accountant. The outstanding loan was for another woman that had a similar first name a completely different last name but in their system my social security number. When they told me this I had visions of all my social security being inaccurate, but when they looked things up they realized that they had superimposed some of her social security numbers. They cleared my social security number off of her account. It took several weeks but my credit report is now clean. The universities need to be more careful in their loan processing.

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