A credit score is more than just a number.   It is your financial reputation.  Quick, off the top of your head - do you know yours?  If you are like most people (myself included), chances are you don’t.  If there is one thing that you know for sure in the modern world, it should be your credit score. 

You can find out your credit score by accessing  your credit report.  How do you do that?  Well, if you listen to television commercials you can do it for free, and that’s true.  However, most of those commercials want you to pay for your free credit report.  You see, you usually have to buy into another service in order to get your free credit report.  The usual suspect is a credit monitoring program.  You are entitled to one free credit report from each of the three National Credit Reporting Bureaus:  Equifax, Transunion and Experian.  By law, you get one from each of them once a year if you ask.

The credit monitoring programs offered in the pay services will give you a free credit report every single month.  Plus, they will not allow any credit account to be opened in your name without your explicit consent. 

So, the skinny on free credit reports is, you can get them free once a year - or you can have them bundled with another useful paid service and get them every month.  It’s a good deal either way.  The choice is yours.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 at 2:43 pm and is filed under Credit, Debt. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.