Find Credit Score

It is virtually impossible to make any financial decision in the U.S. today without knowing what is on your credit report or not knowing your credit score. Any type of loan, many forms of employment, renting a home, purchasing an insurance policy, and creating a new account with any utility will all require a check of your credit score. If your score does not pass muster, then your plans could be delayed for years. This information is used to either approve or deny you, set a premium rate, determine your trustworthiness, or determining if you will need to submit a deposit.

It is a simple matter to obtain a credit report. If you want to find your credit score, that is a totally different matter. Your credit report and credit score are held by the three credit bureaus: Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion. Everyone is legally entitled to receive their credit report free of charge once every 12 months. Your credit report can be obtained more than once per year by paying a fee to each bureau or to a third-party agency that will retrieve your reports for you. The only way to get your annual free credit report is through a government-entitled agency that runs AnnualCreditReport.com. The credit report can be obtained online, by phone, or through the mail. Other services promising a free credit report make you sign up for some fee-based service, sometimes unknowingly, and often the fee recurs and is charged to your credit or debit card each month.

Credit reports contain a listing of all revolving credit accounts, loans, and some utility payments. It also shows who’s been requesting your credit report so you can see if anyone has done so without your permission. One thing that is not on your credit report, though, is your credit score. If you want to find your credit score, you either have to get lucky by having someone reveal it to you during an application for credit, estimate it by performing some calculations, or pay someone to get it for you.

Credit scores, often called FICO scores, are calculated by a formula that remains a trade secret of the Fair Isaac Corporation. The score is made up from the information on a credit report, but only select employees of the Fair Isaac Corporation know exactly how it is calculated.

Many people, instead of finding their credit score, use one of several online FICO score estimators are available. All that is required is to input the information the website asks for that can be obtained from a copy of your credit report. The number you get back, however, is only an estimate.

Other people have confessed that they have been provided with their credit score when applying for a loan. The problem with this is that you have to apply for a loan, and even then, the lender is in no way obliged to help you find a credit score.

The last option to find a credit score is to pay a third-party company to get it for you. Several exist, and they charge a one-time fee. They also have several options because each credit bureau reports different items, so each credit report is usually slightly different from the other. The recommended option is to use the credit report showing the worst credit to find a FICO score. For a slightly higher fee, you can use each credit bureau or a combination of two or all to get multiple possible FICO scores that a lender may be seeing.