I want to find out how my credit score is. I gather that freecreditreport.com isn’t actually free.
MyFICO.com also asks you for your credit card details at the last second. You can sign up, get to see your score and then cancel, but I am suspicious that the cancel part will have deliberately been made awkward, and involve make phone calls to call centers with 3 hour wait lines or something.
So, is in anywhere actually going to tell me my credit score for free? If not, has anyone signed up at one of these websites and then cancelled? What was involved in canceling?
Note that your credit report is not the same thing as a credit score and you’re not legally entitled to a free credit score and good luck finding a free credit score that actually matches your FICO score from any of the CRAs. If you NEED a score that is accurate, ponying up for MyFICO.com is your best option.
Ah OK, I guess I was blissfully unaware that credit report and credit score are different things. So what exactly does a credit report tell you, if it doesn’t tell you your score? Anything useful?
Basically it lists your open credit tradelines (credit cards, installment loans), unpaid bill history, public records like bankruptcies or tax liens, etc.
Take a look at this PDF sample report to get a better idea.
Your credit score is basically the result of an algorithm run against all that data. Obviously if you’ve got a lot of unpaid bills showing up and lots of late payment history on your credit tradelines your score is going to be low, but there are lots of other less obvious reasons for the score to go lower, like credit utilization (if you’ve got access to $25k in credit and your outstanding balances are $20k, your credit score is going to be much lower than if your balances are $5k or less, even if you’ve got no missed payments).
But while it is widely known the sorts of things that ding your credit score, the exact algorithms used to go from your credit report data to a score are proprietary so you can’t really do the calculation yourself. Also the different credit reporting agencies use different variants of the algorithm (IIRC, they all use a variant of FICO, but some other reporting sites don’t give you real FICO scores, but simulated FICO scores that use a different algorithm) so even if you have the same data across all 3 major CRAs, you’ll almost certainly have different scores when ranked from each agency. In any case, the data on each report is certain to be different anyway because of agency specific information (like credit inquiries) or just plain wrong information on one or more agency’s reports.
You should absolutely be taking a look at your credit reports at least once a year. There could be completely wrong information about you on your report and if you don’t dispute it it could just linger there hurting your credit scores which can have pretty bad consequences in many different situations even if you’re one of those “don’t own a credit card, always pay in cash” weirdos.
It can tell you a lot of things. For every form of debt you have (credit card, car loan, etc), it tracks whether you’ve paid on time going back years, I believe. It shows your credit limit and the amount of debt you’re carrying. The formula for the credit score is kept secret, though there are websites that will give you a rough estimate. I had my credit stolen, and the report showed me that there were still credit cards opened in my name that I hadn’t even known about. And it gives you a chance to see if there are any mistakes - debt that you paid but is still showing up, for instance.
The last time I got a credit score was when shopping for motorcycles at a dealership. If you’re willing to feign interest in a purchase, you could do that.
Thanks for the advice. I ran the credit reports last night, which was an interesting exercise. No sign of identity theft which is good, but it’s not very enlightening about what my credit score might possibly be.
The guy I was talking to just told me my score outright (low 700s, which is good I suppose), which I’m not sure every person will do that. If you were to go in and say that you’re considering buying a vehicle, but are currently only really interested in finding out how well you can get financed, that should do the trick.
Beware though that inquiries can lower your score as well. If you’re just checking things out this may be ok but if you’re doing a large purchase such as a house or car this method has some drawbacks.
It actually is, if you stick to the Experian credit report (the company behind freecreditreport). They upsell you on their monitoring service and a triple-report plan (one report from each of the credit agencies). They never stop upselling you, and they do it in such a way that convinces you that it’s necessary, which is why people are critical of them.
If you go to any of the big three agencies for the free report they will make every effort to get you to pay for an annual subscription and if that doesn’t work, they’ll try to get you to do a one-off payment for the score. In a single minimal-length phone call you can easily hear a dozen menu choices at various stages that send you off on a path to credit card number collection. It’s almost at the “we will now bow our heads in payment” level of commercial horror.
