There are some basic financial strategies that mostly all Americans are well aware of. You should save money for a rainy day or unexpected circumstances. You should have at least 3 months worth of living expenses saved in case you lose your job. You should plan for your retirement and ideally put about ten percent of your income toward it yearly. As for credit, you should keep debt down and credit limits up, pay your bills on time and be pretty fierce about protecting those three magic digits that make up your credit score. A crucial part of this, however, is your legally protected right to view a free credit report once a year, and not only should everyone be checking theirs, but they should use it as a tool to protect their finances and not only their credit history, but their credit future.

Your free credit report will break down your credit history into sometimes surprising detail. It logs every relevant account and every single payment. It knows your bank accounts, your credit card accounts, your loan accounts, and everything you’ve ever done with them. The first time a consumer looks at their credit report, it can be a little overwhelming. This means that the first time you look at it, you have to be especially careful to go through and understand everything that’s on there.

The first thing to understand is that there are actually three different credit bureau, which means that at any given time, you have three scores, three histories, and three different places that might have potentially incorrect or damaging information about you. These bureaus are Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. Common thought is that all three bureaus have the exact same information, but that’s patently false. They all measure your “creditworthiness” according to different parameters, and so all come up with a different score and a different history. In addition, the idea that all three are the same can be very misleading because if even one of the bureaus has a piece of damaging information (particularly if it’s incorrect, like a reported late payment that was never actually late) it can significantly impact your credit score.

Beyond the differentials between bureaus, your free credit report contains the information that your FICO score is based on. This includes (in order of weight as applied to the credit score): payment history, credit use, length of history, types of credit, and other credit checks. Payment history makes up about a third of the value of your score, so one of the most important tasks involved with examining your free credit report is to examine the payment history section for anything that might bear a discrepancy with your personal records. If so, fight that discrepancy with the company you make payments to tooth and nail; it’s a third of your credit score being impacted. Credit use is the ratio of used credit to available credit you have extended to you at any given time; obviously, you want to be on the lower end of that ratio. Length of history is a strong impact factor for young people; anyone with less than five years of history is considered a risky investment and will be kept out of the highest echelon of credit scores. Finally, about 10% of your score is based on how many people have checked your credit recently, or how many credit applications you have recently submitted. People with a rash of recent credit checks will be negatively impacted, so choose your credit applications wisely.

What does all this mean? Without checking your free credit report from all three bureaus, you don’t know what’s on there. It’s your legal right to check it, so once a year you should spend some time looking through all three reports to rigorously check the payment history, credit usage, reported length of history, and everything else on your report to make sure it’s all accurate. Don’t settle for a bad score, especially if you don’t deserve it-check your free credit report and protect your finances.

Andy West is a writer on a variety of topics, including finance. Get a free credit report today so that when the time comes for you to get a loan, there won’t be any nasty surprises.