When you’re trying to fix your bad credit, you’ve no doubt come across the multitude of ads on TV and online advertising free credit scores. What you may not be aware of though, is just how much those “free” peeks at your score may end up costing you in the long run.
What you pay for a free score
But before we look at those ads, I’ll start off by letting you know the only REAL place to obtain a truly free copy of your credit report is at AnnualCreditReport.com. The site entitles you to one free copy of your report a year, so long as you request it. As of now, there’s no place to check your numerical score for free.
This can be a problem for anyone who wants to check their credit before they apply for a loan, or is trying credit repair on their own, and could use a peek at their FICO score to see if they’ve made any progress. Only being able to view your credit info when you’re turned down for a line of credit kind of defeats the purpose of trying to fix it in the first place.
Credit bureaus to the rescue(?)
Each of the 3 major credit bureaus (Experian, Equifax and TransUnion) know you can’t really see your score whenever you want, and so offer services that not only let you check your report more than once a year, but monitor all your monthly credit activity, for a modest fee of course.
That’s all well and good if you’re in the middle of credit repair and want to monitor your report and check your progress each month, but what about the scores themselves?
No one below this number need apply
At the end of the day, the one thing most people care about is their score. It’s what lenders and creditors look for, and it’s what fuels our credit repair efforts so we can get the loans we want. It’s also not available for free anywhere, at all.
With that in mind, many companies who used to advertise free reports are going after selling free scores with similar monthly monitoring services.
The only site that lets you get a peek at your actual score that I can recommend is myFICO.com. They charge you for the privilege, but it’s honestly the best place online to obtain your actual credit score, and you can simply cancel your membership once you’ve seen all you need to.
And if your score isn’t as high as you need it to be…?
Consider consulting a credit repair services firm to help you work out your credit issues if your score isn’t where you’d like it to be. Work towards settling old accounts and getting new ones up to date, and your score will soon be looking ready for prime time.
