Top Vendors for Credit Score Report

A Guide to Credit Score Report

The strength of your credit score is vital to the success of your financial life.  A good rating will allow you to borrow money towards a business venture or a personal investment like a home or car, and a great rating will allow you to do so at very low interest rates.  So it’s effectively money in your pocket, and the sooner you know why it’s useful to you and how to get the most out of it, the better.  Let’s take a look.

Why You Need It

Are you interested in starting a business, or investing money towards a project that will assure your security or prosperity?  Do you want to buy a house that you can have a reasonable chance of paying off soon?  Is good medical insurance at good rates something that you want to have access to?  All these and many other life decisions are partly governed by your credit score.

Getting the report and keeping an eye on it periodically can make the difference between good planning and bad.  Making a large investment – of any kind – should be soberly understood in the light of your credit report, because it will determine how high you should aim and what you can reasonably achieve. 

Maybe even more importantly, catching mistakes or discrepancies in your credit report will allow you to effectively curtail identity theft, which is a growing problem for many Americans.  If you can identify fraudulent financial actions taken on your behalf as soon as they happen, you’re in a much better position to fix the damage that could have otherwise crippled your fiscal life.

How To Get It

Credit reports are generated by a number of credit bureaus – companies that gather data on your purchasing habits and debt history to better judge your creditworthiness.  The three major firms in the U. S. are Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax, and you should make sure your credit reports comes from one or all of them if you want to get the most relevant data.

There are a number of free online tools for getting your credit score report, but use caution: they may be fraudulent, or they may not use the right information to determine it.  By law, the three major firms must share their databases with the government, and you can access your score any time for free at the website set up by the governing agency, the Fair Credit Reporting Act.  It’s the only site that’s officially licensed for free use, but it can only be used once a year. 

If you want more frequent credit checks, you may want to invest in a monitoring tool provided by one of the major firms.  They usually allow you a free or low-cost trial, and the cost of constant, thorough monitoring – with detailed reports on the source info – can usually be purchased for around $15 a month.

Conclusion

Your credit score report is useful to you and available free, so check it out and get started with a deeper understanding of your financial life.