Where to Get Credit Report & Credit Scores
Don't buy a credit score from anyone other than the credit bureaus or Fair Isaac, makers of the FICO score equation, and don't buy a credit report from anyone, you can get your credit report for free by law.
As a personal finance blogger, I see a lot of shady stuff floating around the Interwebs. Whether it's some crazy Google get rich quick scheme or fake ads touting President Obama giving out more stimulus checks, there's always some sort of scam out there waiting to snag a few unsuspecting consumers. Lately, there have been a lot of no-name companies offering to sell you your credit report or your credit score. Don't buy anything from them.
If you want your credit report, go to AnnualCreditReport.com. The Fair Credit Reporting Act gives you the right to see your credit report every twelve months. The government set up the AnnualCreditReport.com website for you to request these reports. Don't go anywhere else and don't pay for what is yours for free by law.
If you want your credit score, you'll have to pay for it. The FCRA doesn't give you the right to see your credit score every twelve months, just the report. You can buy your score from the bureaus or from MyFICO, which is Fair Isaac's consumer facing corporation for credit products. All of the bureaus offer a trial service, usually of an identity theft monitoring product, that let's you see your FICO credit score if you sign up for that trial.
Do not buy your credit score from a company other than the three bureaus or Fair Isaac. If you aren't dealing with Experian, Equifax, TransUnion, or Fair Isaac directly, stop immediately. There are two reasons why:
- The other companies selling credit reports and bureaus are usually not affiliated with the three bureaus or Fair Isaac and they intend to sell your information to the highest bidder. Whereas the bureaus intend to make their money on people sticking around for the trial service, these independent companies profit off selling your information.
- The bureaus and Fair Isaac already have your personal information, why give your sensitive information to yet another company that doesn't need it? When I give Equifax my social security number, it's used as a way to look up my credit report. Who knows what happens when I give it to some fly-by-night company?
To recap: If you want your credit report, which you should review once every twelve month, go to AnnualCreditReport.com. If you want your credit score, go to one of the three bureaus or Fair Isaac.
If you want a happy life, try to avoid the whole credit and debt game entirely and it's one less thing to worry about. :)
Jim writes about money issues at his personal finance blog Bargaineering.com.
(Photo: jadedhalo)
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Comments:
Also worth noting - don't buy any Experian score, period. They no longer allow consumers access to their FICO scores (with the exception of, I think, one local credit union that provides EX FICOs to its customers), so ANY score you buy from Experian will be utterly worthless.
Annualcreditreport.com allows you to get your credit report for free from *each* of the three credit bureaus once every twelve months. If you stagger them out, you'll be able to get your credit report from one of the three bureaus every four months.
You can get a free credit score as often as you'd like from creditkarma.com. I believe they use TransUnion, but I'm not 100% positive on that.
NO! Do not buy your scores from the bureaus main sites! Be sure you are getting the real thing. Remember there is no place to buy a Experian FICO.
ONLY buy them from....
@FDCPAGuy: As Greg Fisher at creditscoring.com would say stay away from FAKE-O scores and get it from the source.
But those sites you recommend don't have a catchy jingle/jingles that make you want to shove a screwdriver into your ear to get it stop. Oh please, for the love of the Gods, make it stop. Kill me, please. IT'S EATING MY BRAIN!!!!
@MsAnthropy:
Yup Experian (or XPN as those in the business abbreviate them) suck for many reasons. This being one of them. I could quite a few other reasons but I don't want to bore everyone here on a Saturday ;)
Any helpful tidbits for your Canadian neighbours wondering about their credit scores?
@GitEmSteveDave_Worked4TheWeekend: True, but you're not selling fish to tourists in T-shirts, nor is your posse getting laughed at.
There's also creditkarma.com, which provides free access to your TransUnion score for free. I don't have any complaints about this site; anyone else find it useful?
@MattSaintCool: [www.econsumer.equifax.ca]
Equifax looks to be the only one you can buy- and it's $24 CND!!
@FDCPAGuy: please, i'm curious - that's who i requested my annual free credit report from and then used it to estimate my FICO before applying for a mortgage earlier this year.
[by 'requested my annual free credit report from' i mean that you can get your free credit report once a year from EACH bureau and you can do it at different times of the year. helps if you are tracking something, like estimating where your FICO is, so you can fix things to make it better over time in preparation for, oh, say, buying a house]
MattSaintCool : We just looked up our credit scores, as our mortgage is up for renewal, and we were curious. Turns out that was a good idea, we corrected a student loan that had been marked bad by the bank, when in reality it had been paid off. Helped our credit score.
You can get your credit report _*_ABSOLUTELY FREE_*_ from Transunion and Equifax in Canada, they are required to provide it by _LAW_. No charge, just call them, and you'll get your credit report FREE in about 6-8 weeks.
Any firm that charges money for credit reports in Canada is ripping you off!
Equifax Canada
1-800-465-7166 (toll-free)
[www.equifax.ca]
Transunion Canada
1-866-525-0262 (toll-free)
[www.tuc.ca]
(as well, you can file for a credit report online, but we were unsuccesful, as they required clarification of some information in personal submission such as credit letters or forms, then you will have to submit your credit report application via snail mail, which will take the aforementioned 6-8 weeks.)
@Jerry Vandesic: Same here. Can't vouch for the accuracy of the score as I've never paid to get my score, but it seems about right and I've found it useful.
"If you want your credit score, you'll have to pay for it." Not necessarily.
If you look at buying a house, and talk to the ever-eager mortgage guy at your real estate agent's office, he will be more than happy to tell you if you qualify for a loan or not. He will do a check on your credit right there in the office, instantly. He can have your FICO score and everything else in seconds. By law, he is required to provide you with a copy of what he digs up. He'll give you a detailed printout.
All you have to do to get a free FICO score is get interested in a house long enough to have the mortgage person at your agent's office get interested in you. That does not take much. And you can get uninterested a week or so later in the house.
I don't think they are worth paying for unless you are about to buy a house. I did pay for mine for a while from myfico, I then compared it to CreditKarma. Now I use CreditKarma only, knowing that it will track the real scores. CreditKarma isn't even close to a FICO score. My score was 724 and CreditKarma was 770. At lease I can track big changes with CreditKarma to see to see if there are any big changes- and it is free.
I just found quizzle. They give you a free credit report and score every 6 months and you don't have to sign up for any membership. It seemed real close to my true Fico. This WSJ article talks about the free choices:
@frank64: Another article I found from someone in the comments section of the WSJ
Where to Check Your Financial Pulse
By MIKE HOGAN
How to figure out how fiscally fit you are
@Jerry Vandesic: The score Creditkarma shows you is based on Creditkarma's own formula; it is not actually your FICO. But it's still useful to gauge your score's trend, as your FICO score's trend will likely be the same.
I just did my annual checkup via MyFico.
I was surprised to see they only carry TransUnion and Exquifax now-- Experian is no longer available from them.
What's the deal? Is it still valuable to check my Experian score, or can I blow that off now?
@MattSaintCool: In the United States, absolutely no impact whatsoever for requesting your own report and scores.
I presume it should be the same in Canada as well.
@Daveinva: Experian got into disagreement with FICO (formerly known as Fair Isaac) and soon after, FICO stopped offering EX scores to the public (although they still provide EX scores to creditors, etc.)
Unfortunately, you can't really blow off EXP, as many creditors still rely on them (with regional variations), but you can't check your FICO EX score either. Can't win either way.
@Trencher93: Similarly, we were considering ncreasing our HELOC to use as a down payment on some land we wanted to opurchase. The bank ran our credit report and mailed the results to us. No charge to us, and we were able to confirm that our credit score was still very good from several years ago when we re-mortgaged our house to get a lower rate and shorter term.
@azntg: I simply have my experian report frozen for good.
You want to pull experian? experian only? I guess I won't be doing business with ya.
right now I am using Truecredit.com which is offered by Transunion. Is this ok?
@Chongo: No, it only allows monthly pulls of all three CRAs. Plus, like EVERY monitoring service(less the infamous, sucky ScoreWatch) gives fake scores.
www.creditchecktoal.com
*call before the trial runs out and they'll lower the price to 9.99. You can pull all theree CBRs every day :)
@Trencher93:
I don't believe there is a law which requires the mortgage lender to give you the whole report. I know the company which I work for gives you your credit scores and score factors (which most people don't understand) in the loan paperwork and govt disclosures. If you ask we'll usually send the credit report. The only time, by law, you get a free full report is when you are denied a loan application.
@wcnghj:
Yeah but inquiries account for somewhat like 10% of your overall score and 1 won't kill you. I'd rather people focus on the other 90% of what makes up a score than focus on 'oh but the inquiry will hurt'
@flynnfx: Thanks for the links since I've wondered about that for a long time. I have to admit they confused me though, because of the prices marked on those pages. Moving a bit further took me to the free credit disclosure pages:
[www.equifax.com]
[www.transunion.ca]
Ha, they look pretty much the same but they jump to pages just before the forms. The Equifax links are on the right of the page.
Actually the way to keep a watch on your credit is to visit only ONE of the Fair Isaac sites every 4 months thereby being able to check your credit thrice a year.
And to add to all this fun, Experian has sent many jobs that have access to our credit data to Santiago Chile. If you write in to Experian to contest something on your report, there is a very good chance that someone in Chile is the one to access your credit information and send out the response to you.
I've written my senators, congressman, and even Obama about it, but they don't seem to care. If more people writing about this concern hopefully we can get the government to better protect our senstive credit information from being accessed in other countries.
Xot
Radical here. I have a modest (radical) proposal that should be adopted into law just like the free credit report. We consumers should have online 24/7 access to our CREDIT SCORE in real time just like we do with our credit report. We compiled the score (just like the credit report) and we have to answer for it. It's information that now affects where we live ( can I get that mortgage ?) , where we work (many employers now do a credit score check before hiring) and what we drive (car dealers use this to see if you are a real prospective customer) , but we have to PAY for this and even if inaccurate , we're stuck with it. It should be free. Fair Isaac could still charge for access to potential creditors , but the owner of the information should be entitled to a free report (or at a nominal cost to defray the expense) for the asking. All of the information now lies with the other side of a negotiation involving credit scoring. This would even the playing fireld somewhat and make customers more informed and realistic about their credit options.
Now. Fair Isaac is not going to like this. They have made a pretty lucrative game of controlloing many facets of our live by their control of this information. But if you remember slaying the credit bureau dragon a few years ago for access to their reports, (Note that the big credit bureaus DID NOT go away ,in fact they are as powerful as ever), you remember it was a " man behind the curtain" moment when we got access to our own information.
Jim seems like a really nice guy so I hate to say this, but I've seen a couple of posts on here from him and they all have significant errors regarding credit reports and credit scores. I don't think he's trying to hold himself out as any sort of expert, and this is just a blog, so we're not holding anyone to any high standards -- but I'd just check the facts on his posts before relying on them.
(Sorry -- like I said, I appreciate him posting, and think he's a nice guy.)
The very existence of the discussions above warrants a complete review of the credit reporting industry.
@ben: Credit Karma is About 50 Pts off in my case .. That is Waaay to far off to be worthwhile .. At least it was 50 Pts lower then my actual Score i got from the bank
@Jerry Vandesic: Credit Karma is About 50 Pts off in my case .. That is Waaay to far off to be worthwhile .. At least it was 50 Pts lower then my actual Score i got from the bank
@wcnghj: Equifax is the only credit reporting agency that EXCLUSIVELY provides consumers with the FICO Score--the score 90% of lenders use. What that means is that, consumers will only receive a FICO Score if they purchase their score from Equifax--we provide the FICO Score and the FICO Score only on our website. So consumers can feel confident purchasing their score from us at www.equifax.com or by using the direct URL that you included above--they'll wind up at the same place.
Thanks for spreading the word.
Demitra Wilson
Director of Public Relations
Equifax Personal Information Solutions
Great post, Jim. Consumers should definitely consider the source when it comes to purchasing their credit report and credit score. Equifax has been the most trusted name in credit for more than 100 years now, so we understand the importance of helping consumers understand their credit and protect the power of their identity.
As you suggest, it is important for consumers to be wary of sharing their personal information with unknown third parties; equally important is knowing that the score they purchase is a FICO score--the score 90% of lenders use. Equifax provides the FICO Score and the FICO Score only (no other proprietary scores) to consumers on its website (www.equifax.com); so consumers can feel confident knowing that they are getting more than a directional score.
Thanks for keeping your readers informed.
Demitra Wilson
Director of Public Relations
Equifax Personal Information Solutions
I go one step further and say don't even buy your score from the web sites for Equifax, Experian and Transunion. Everytime I see these reports come across my desk at work they are Experian PLUS scores or Vantage scores and not even a FICO. Stick strictly to myfico.com is my $0.02