Get Free Information About Your Credit Score

By Joseph Ducat

Have you recently been turned down for a loan and want to know the reason? Well, the answer may lie in an important statistic called a credit score. This is a measure of how your creditors view you--a good score indicates that you are worthy of credit, otherwise a poor score signals that you pose a risk to creditors. If your credit score has a bad rating, then you will find it difficult to qualify for loans, insurance, credit cards, and so on. If you experience a rejection, you should check to see if your credit score is the problem.

Fortunately, you can get this kind of information from your credit report. And there is a law, the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which compels any organization that turns down your application for credit, insurance, or employment to provide you with your report if you request for it within 60 days of being notified of the rejection.

Credit reports are compiled by three nationwide consumer reporting companies. They are Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion. You can purchase a copy of your credit report from one or all three of these agencies, or from other companies that offer the credit reports as part of a larger package. The cost involved generally ranges from $10 to $15.

However, you are legally entitled to receive a free copy of your credit report once every 12 months from each of the three consumer reporting firms. You can access it from a centralized website at annualcreditreport.com. Of course, if you want to subsequently track changes on your credit standing, you will have to purchase the rest of your credit reports for the next 12 months. With that in mind, it is easy to see the advantages of a paid package that includes a lengthy credit monitoring period. But you can definitely get the initial credit report for free.

Once you have your credit report, you can find out whether you have a bad credit rating or not. If the news is bad, there are a number of actions you can take. You can choose to dispute an error or fraudulent item in your credit report. You are entitled to ask the consumer reporting agency to verify the disputed item in your credit report, and they have to do the verification for free. Of course, you will have to send them a dispute letter and copies of documents that can help to verify your claim, so there are still some costs involved. But it is still relatively inexpensive to get most discrepancies in your credit repaired.

Find out more helpful information about consumer reporting agencies and other credit topics at http://getbettercredit.info