Credit Report & Score know your number
Check your credit report
Federal law makes it your right to get access to your credit report for free. Your report can be obtained from AnnualCreditReport.com
Be careful! Many sites claim to offer "free" credit reports, but AnnualCreditReport.com is the only official site authorized by Congress to provide credit reports for free as a service to the public.
Learn about your credit
Your credit history plays a major role in determining what interest rate you will pay when you finance your next auto purchase.
Credit Reports
The basic component of your credit history is your credit report. In the United States, there are three major credit bureaus that build and maintain credit reports: Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax. These credit bureaus maintain relationships with banks, credit unions, utility companies, and other organizations that extend credit to people. The bureaus receive data from these organizations about what loans you have and how well you have done making your payments on time. They compile this information into your credit report.
Each credit bureaus creates their own report on you, so you have three credit reports, not just one.
Geismar Complex Federal Credit Union will take the time to review your credit report to ensure that they have the best understanding of your financial situation.
Credit Scores
Credit reports can be long and complex, so a credit score is a way to summarize all the information in the report into one number. When a lender is considering offering you credit, they may use a summary score from the credit bureau as part of their decision-making process. The credit score is also known as a FICO score because the method of automatically creating a score from a credit report was developed by the Fair Isaac Corporation.
In the same way that you have three credit reports, you also have three FICO credit scores, one from each credit bureau. Which of the three scores should you look at? Geismar Complex Federal Credit Union will obtain your score from Equifax, so the Equifax FICO score will be the most important to you.
Free Credit Scores?
Many websites claim to offer free credit scores. Watch out! Obtaining a real FICO credit score costs money, and it is rare that anyone will pay that money on your behalf and then simply give you the score free. Usually these "free" sites fall into one of two categories:
- They ask for your credit card and start charging you monthly fees if you forget to call them within 30 days to cancel.
- They give you some other score rather than the FICO score that most lending institutions use.