Neha Menon

Every time you apply for a personal loan, home loan, or credit card in India, the lender’s first move is almost always the same: they check your CIBIL score. Banks, NBFCs, and credit card issuers use this number as an early filter before they look at anything else. Yet most first-time borrowers have heard the

When you need money urgently, applying to every bank, NBFC, and loan app that shows up in a Google search feels like the sensible thing to do. More applications — higher chance of approval, right? Not quite. Every time a lender formally checks your credit report to process your application, it creates an entry called

You paid your credit card bill in full. On time. Every single month. And yet your CIBIL score showed movement — or a lender asked why your card usage looked high. If this sounds familiar, you are not alone. Millions of Indian card users are disciplined about repayment but still unclear about one thing: credit

Finding a wrong entry in your credit report is unsettling — especially when you are about to apply for a personal loan, credit card, or home loan. A loan account that shows active after you closed it, an overdue status after you paid the final EMI, a hard inquiry from a lender you never approached,

If your CIBIL score shows as “not generated” or “NH” when you check it, you are not alone — and you have not done anything wrong. Millions of Indians in their early working years have never taken a loan or credit card, which means the credit bureaus simply have no repayment record to score. No

You buy a ₹40,000 phone on an EMI card, the merchant calls it a no-cost EMI, and you walk out thinking nothing will show up on your credit history. A few months later, a lender you are applying to pulls your CIBIL report and sees an active loan account. You had no idea it was

Someone close to you — a cousin, a colleague, a childhood friend — has asked you to sign as a guarantor for their loan. It feels like a small favour. You are not the one taking the money. You are not paying any EMI right now. So what is the risk? The honest answer: more

Most people say yes to becoming a co-applicant without thinking twice. It feels like a favour — your spouse needs a home loan, your sibling is applying for a personal loan, your child is going to college. You sign the form and move on. What many co-applicants find out later — sometimes years later —

You open your credit report and spot a list of “enquiries” you do not recognise. Or a friend warns you: “Do not check your CIBIL score too often — it will go down.” Or you compare loan offers on three different websites and suddenly worry whether each comparison created a mark on your report. These