These days, it’s absolutely critical to routinely monitor your personal credit information and overall credit health. You want to be on the lookout for fraud, but you also want to track your creditworthiness so you don’t overpay when it comes time to borrow money.
This page describes as simply as possible how to check your own credit score and report for free without using some service that requires a credit card or will start billing you later. (For an archive of all credit related posts, go here.)
Beware “Free” Credit Score Offers
It’s easy to access your own credit info online, but you need to watch out for sites that bait you with a free credit score and then ding your credit card $15 or more a month for credit monitoring or protection. If you need frequent access to your credit report and scores, you may want to pay for a credit monitoring service like this one, but you don’t have to if you just want to get your credit report or an estimate of your credit score.
Getting Your Free Credit Report
Once a year, you can download a free copy of each of your three credit reports at annualcreditreport.com. It’s mandated by law, but this is the only site where you can do this.
This gets you your credit report–the detailed lists of your credit accounts, debt balances, and payment history–but will NOT show you your credit score, the number lenders use to evaluate your creditworthiness and compare you to other borrowers.
Getting Your Free Credit Score
For your credit score, I recommend the truly free service for checking and monitoring your credit score, CreditKarma. I’ve been using CreditKarma for over a year now and am impressed. (I should also disclose that several months after I tried CreditKarma, I joined Money Under 30 with their affiliate program, meaning this site earns a small amount for referring new users).
CreditKarma provides free monthly tracking of your credit score and tools to evaluate your overall credit health. It’s free because they can advertise things on their site like targeted credit card offers, so they don’t have to charge you. Try CreditKarma now »
Notes
- Checking your credit will not cause your credit score to go down.
- Your credit report and credit score are related, but different. Hit up annualcreditreport.com for your report, and CreditKarma for a free credit score.
- These sites will ask for personal information like your SSN—they have to in order to verify your identity and pull your credit information.
- Do beware of sites that require a credit card number to check your report or score—they will probably charge your card monthly unless you cancel.
