Get Your Credit Report
To get your credit report, you really don’t need too much time or money and the benefits of having your report can be big.
In fact, by law the main consumer reporting companies are required to provide consumers with a free credit report every year, if the consumer asks for it. All you need to do is get in contact with the companies and put in a request.
The three companies you are going to want to conact are Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion and you can even get a combined report.
But should you get a combined report or should you spread your credit report requests out over a 12 month period?
Well if it’s just curiosity that is leading you to get a credit report, then you should probably just get the combined report and be done with it. It will show you your credit standing with an itemised list of your credit items from each of the three consumer reporting companies.
Of course, if you are in the process of trying to improve your credit rating then you may like to consider requesting only one report from one of the consumer reporting companies to get an idea of where you stand in the eyes of lenders.
Armed with that basic information from the one agency, you can go about taking steps to improve your credit score, before ordering another report a few months later.
This will be able to show you whether or not your efforts have resulted in actual improvements to your credit standing.
Now, the downside of this method is that each of the consumer reporting companies uses different and independent sources of information to compile your credit report.
Just because you have improved your credit standing with one consumer reporting agency, does not mean that your credit score has improved with the others.
There are services which can take the headache out of this entire process and help to give you the best chance of improving your credit with all of the agencies.
After they have taken steps to improve your credit score, you will be able to get your credit report from them to view those improvements.
While you can manage the entire process yourself without employing anybody’s help, often professional services are able to get better results due to the fact that they know what to look for in credit reports that can be improved and they know the best steps to take to ensure that the items on your credit report have the best chance of being shown in a favorable light.
In the end it’s your decision, but remember - when you get your credit report, your options are very open on how to improve it.
