How Do I Check My Credit Score Online?

Question: “I want to check my credit score because I’m applying for a mortgage loan soon. What’s the best way to check it without having to pay for other stuff I don’t need?”

This is a common question among home buyers. Here’s why. You see a website that offers you a free credit score, which is great. But then you read the fine print and learn that you have to sign up for some kind of credit-monitoring service. All you want to do is check your credit score, but now you’re stuck. How do you get the scores alone, without signing up for the monthly service?

This is a common frustration, and it’s mostly the result of marketing. Many companies will “bundle” credit reports and scores together, in conjunction with some kind of monthly service for monitoring / identity theft protection. They offer the free reports and scores, but they require you to join their “CreditWatch 3000″ service — or whatever they call it.

In this article, I’ll explain how to cut through all of the marketing-related confusion and  check your credit score only. There are actually several ways to go about it, and I’ll cover all of them. But first, we need to cover a bit of background material.

Credit Reports, Scores and Monitoring Services

All of this will make a lot more sense, once we clear up some terminology. In particular, there are three items you need to know about it:

1. Credit Reports — This is a record of your financial activity over the years. In particular, it shows how you have borrowed and repaid money (via credit cards, loans, etc.). You have three of these reports, because there are three company who compile this sort of data. The companies are TransUnion, Equifax and Experian. By law, you are entitled to receive one free report per year, from all three of these companies.
2. Credit Scores — There are different kinds, but you only need to worry about your FICO credit score. This is a number between 300 and 850, and it’s based on the information within your credit reports. The raw data / information from your reports gets put through a scoring model, and then you end up with a score. When a lender says they need to check your credit, they are usually referring to your FICO score. Unfortunately, there is no law that gives you free access to your scores. There should be, but there’s not.
3. Monitoring Services — I mentioned these services at the beginning of this article. There are different versions, and they all go by different names. Basically, they will monitor all three of your credit reports (item #1 above) for signs of suspicious activity. In theory, this would help you spot identity theft / fraud, and it would also help you remove erroneous information from your reports (so that it doesn’t affect your score). I have no idea how effective these services are, but that’s what they are designed to do.

Does everything make sense so far? Good. Because if you can keep these three items separate, you can check your credit score without buying something else you don’t need. Many people confuse items #1 and #2 above. They think that reports and scores are all the same, but they are not. That’s why I’ve broken them down like this — to help you understand the difference.

What Do You Need to Check?

You should review your credit reports every year or two. Unfortunately, this is not a perfect system, and errors often show up on reports. If you find erroneous information (such as a credit account that’s not yours), you can dispute it through the company that produced that report. They all have a section of their websites for this very purpose. These might be clerical errors, or they might be a sign of identity theft. So you should check your credit reports periodically to spot this kind of thing.

There’s only one website regulated by the federal government that gives you access to your free reports. That website is AnnualCreditReport.com.

If you obtain them from any other website, there’s a 99% chance you’ll end up paying for something (such as the monitoring services described above). I’m not saying you do or don’t need such monitoring services. That’s something you must decide for yourself. I’m just saying you can get your free reports without signing up for monthly services. And you would do this by using the website listed above.

That covers your reports. But how do you check your credit score alone, without any other “add-on” products? Here’s how…

How to Check Your Credit Score Only

There is currently no way to check your credit score for free, without paying for something along the way. But if you want to get your scores by themselves, you can do so for a small fee (a one-time purchase with no monthly service add-on).

You can purchase your scores directly from the credit-reporting companies. But my advice is to purchase all three at once through the MyFICO.com website. This is the website of the company that created the FICO scoring model, mentioned previously. You can also check your scores through the Credit.com website.

When using either of these websites, be sure to read all of the fine print. They usually promote their “bundled” services more heavily (the ones that include monthly monitoring). So you might have to dig around to find the page where you can buy your scores only.

This articles answers the all-too-common question: “How do I check my credit score without paying for things I don’t need?” If you found this article helpful, be sure to look through the rest of the website. There are hundreds of articles on this and related subjects. You can also check the main credit page for a list of recent blog posts on this subject.