Get A Copy of My Credit Report
| 06 September 2009
How To Get A Copy of My Credit Report
A lot of people ask us, "How to get a copy of my credit report?" There are many things in life these days that require having a good credit score, including applying for a loan, renting an apartment, applying for credit cards and even certain jobs. If you are thinking of taking out a mortgage you should definitely check your credit score before you start looking at real estate even if you never had any debts in your life. You may find some surprising things on it.
A credit report contains a person's credit score or rating and all of their credit history. It shows whether a person has missed payments on a credit card or loan, whether payment of certain bills was made on time, and any outstanding debts such as unpaid court judgments and tax liens. Of course bankruptcy also shows up too.
There are three recognized credit bureaus in the USA. All of these keep independent reports on practically every adult in the country.
When you apply for a loan, the finance company will apply to whichever bureau it is a member of, to get your score and your report. Usually they will make a decision based on the score alone. Sometimes, if your score is right around their cutoff point, they make take into account the details of your credit history.
If you ever get turned down for a loan you should check all of your credit reports right away. Do not apply for another loan until you have discovered what the problem is, because any rejected application is going to bring your score down even lower. If there are mistakes, you can have them corrected before you make another application.
Be careful not to have too many people check your credit in a short time. A lot of enquiries cause the report to be flagged. So do not give loan companies, potential landlords etc permission to check your credit score until you have decided that you definitely want the loan or apartment that you were looking at. Ten different landlords applying for a credit report on you within a short time would flag you as a possible bad credit risk.
The three credit bureaus that keep reports on you if you are a United States resident are Experian, Equifax and TransUnion. You can find all of these online, but do not apply direct to them to see your report. The services they provide through their websites are for people who want to see their report more often. You probably do not need this.
Under the FACT Act (Fair Credit Reporting Act) consumers have the right to see their reports once per year for free. You can get all three credit reports together by going here: http://www.annualcreditreport.com
(See http://www.ftc.gov/freereports )
However you can also get a free or low-cost report in some other circumstances, even if you already saw it less than a year ago:
- if you have received an adverse action notice in the last 60 days because of information in a credit report
- if you are unemployed or receiving welfare
- if you know that you have been the victim of fraud or ID theft, and you think this may have affected your credit score
- if your state law allows you to get more free or low-price credit reports.
If you want to see your credit report more than once in a year and the above points do not apply, the companies are allowed to charge you. You could expect to pay around $10 for each report.
Browse around our site for more information on credit and debt management.
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