Fixing Low Credit Scores with an Absolutely Free Credit Report

Shawn | Nov 19, 2010 |

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Low credit scores can affect your entire life. Beyond preventing you from getting credit to make purchases, it can also negatively impact your job hunt. More and more employers are checking credit scores of their job applicants before making a hiring decision.

If you suspect your past is littered with low credit scores, the first thing you need to do is find a company that offers an absolutely free credit report and see the good or bad news for yourself.

Any major search engine will give you at least a couple of online options for a credit report at no charge. Be wary, however, and read the fine print of each before signing up. There are very few that really offer an absolutely free credit report, and even those will try to sell you additional information for a fee.

The typical approach is to provide you with a free report from one of the three major credit reporting agencies, at the same time advising you that you really need to study a report from each of the three agencies, for a monthly payment of approximately 25.

There are valid reasons for you to look at the score you have been assigned by each of the credit reporting agencies. While you won't see a huge scoring difference, Experian, Trans Union and Equifax each have their own system and administrators, and their own schedules. One might simply have erred and included a bad debt you paid off years ago. Checking only one of the two others prior to your seeking a mortgage for the house you're trying to buy could leave you embarrassed and without a loan.

Still, if you're trying to keep your costs down, that absolutely free credit report from one agency can give you a glimpse into your credit score, your bad debt, your debt-to-credit ratio, and the number of alerts on your credit history. From here you can begin to repair your credit by making contact with debtors and paying your old bills one debt at a time. You can dispute any debts that you believe are wrong with a simple online process that asks you to explain why you think an error has been made, and periodically lets you know how the dispute is progressing.

Once you have resolved the credit risk issues in this one absolutely free credit report, you can then spend that 25 to look at the two other agency reports, and keep an eye on your history, so that sooner or later low credit scores are a thing of the past.