Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Where To Get Free Credit Reports And Free Credit Scores

Quite a while back I gave you some places to pull your credit reports online, for free.  Yes, I said FREE!  There has been a change and I have another place to tell you about so I thought it would be time to give you this information again.

The first place you can get copies of all 3 of your credit reports, once a year, is from annualcreditreport.com but it does not have your scores.  You will need to answer questions about some things about yourself that may be on your credit report in order to get each of them. The link to each of the credit bureaus takes you off the site temporarily.  The best way to get them through this site is to pick one, and start to get your report.  If you don't know the answer to the questions, stop and go back and try the next one. When you get questions you know that you know the answers to, proceed and get your report. Then save a copy of it to your computer.  You will use this report to help you answer the questions you'll get when you go back to get the other 2 reports.  Each time, save a copy to your computer so you have it, since you won't be able to keep logging in all year.

The next three places are also free and they ask you some questions, but they give you your credit scores. Just remember, these are NOT FICO scores, they are Vantage scores or something similar.  They are what we in the credit repair industry call FAKO scores.  These are NOT the scores lenders use, but they at least give you somewhat of an idea what your FICO score is. Unfortunately, sometimes the scores can be off by 20 points or more, sometimes higher and sometimes lower than your true FICO score, which IS the scoring model that lenders use.

Credit Karma.  creditkarma.com gives you a report from TransUnion.  It is my least favorite because so far, I have not been able to save a report in a good format from them.  To me, its kind of funky. But, it updates every single month, so its also kind of like a free credit monitoring service.  

Quizzle.  quizzle.com used to give you a free credit report from Experian.  But, in mid January of this year (2014), they changed to Equifax.  I like this report.  It looks good, easy to read, and you can easily save a nicely formatted report to your computer.  It updates every six months, so its not as good of a monitoring service as CreditKarma, but, hey, its free!  You can get a paid version that will update every month, if you want to go that route. But, there are lots of credit monitoring sites you can use, many of them being owned by Experian. They can range from $12.95/mo to $30/mo usually.  The more expensive ones, if you prefer to use them, just call first and ask them to reduce the price since you can get the monitoring service cheaper somewhere else, and they usually reduce down to about $15/month for you.

Credit Sesame. creditsesame.com gives you a free credit report from Experian.  I have to admit, I have never used this, but I probably will soon, just to see if its every bit as good as they claim.  They say you can get your Experian report free and your Experian (think Vantage) score free every single month. They claim to have free credit monitoring every single month too.  Now if these things are true and if you can save a nicely formatted report to your computer, then this would be my favorite.  Think about it. Free report and score, free monitoring every single month, why would you want to pay for monitoring somewhere else? (UPDATE:  CreditSesame SUCKS BIG TIME!  It's a huge waste. You don't get squat for free except a fake score and the opportunity to be bombarded to buy services or apply for cards, etc. Stick with the free Experian report you get from annualcreditreport.com.  No score but at least you can see what is on your credit!!)

The only thing that's left to find is a free credit analyzing tool.  Many of the paid monitoring sites have them, but I don't know if these 3 free sites will ever give it for free.  We'll have to keep our fingers crossed.  These tools are fun to play with because they show you what to do to increase your score by inputting different scenarios, like removing collections, removing balances, adding credit lines, etc.  These are very handy to have so you can set your sights on a credit goal and it will show you how to get there.

Well, hopefully you enjoy and can use this information.  Get your free reports, save them to your computer, and if you want some help with your credit repair efforts, send me an email or call me. Your reports will be super simple to email over so you can get going on your fresh start right away!

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1 comment:

  1. The only thing that's left to find is a free credit analyzing tool. Many of the paid monitoring sites have them, but I don't know if these 3 free sites will ever give it for free.
    Visit: Credit Monitoring

    ReplyDelete

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