The Money Puzzle

Do you ever wonder how to find your credit score? You know, your credit score is very important to many things you may want or need to do. You have to have a good credit score in order to get a loan on a house or a car (or a personal loan). You also have to have a good credit score to get approved for credit cards. Some apartments or rental houses require a good credit score before they will let you rent there. You have to have a good score to get cell phone service. Some jobs even require you to have a good credit score before they will hire you. In fact, a good credit score is so important that some people are running credit checks on potential dates before they will go out with them, and engaged couples are checking each others’ credit before they say, “I do.”

Obviously, your credit score is something you want to keep on top of, to make sure it is accurate and reflects the good things you want other people to see. To do that, you need to know how to find your credit score. So how do you do that? It’s easy!

How to Find Your Credit Score

1. Go to TransUnion.com. Purchase your credit report with score (make sure you include the option to get your credit report with the score). Pay for the report with score with your credit card and look at your report and score online.

2. Do the same thing as #1 above, but with Equifax.com and Experian.com. Read your credit report from these credit agencies and look at your score with each one of them.

3. Look for errors on your credit reports from each credit agency. If you find any errors that are negatively impacting your credit score, dispute those things with the credit agency. There is often an option to do this online, or you can call the agency or write them with your dispute.

Remember, not all businesses report to all three credit agencies, so some things on one report might not be on another. This can make your credit score different among all three credit agencies. Your score may be significantly higher with some agencies than with others. The opposite can also be true. Some agencies may have old, outdated information that should have gone off of your report long ago. If the information is bad and it is over seven years old, ask that it be taken off of your credit report.

Now that you know how to find your credit score, you can look it up any time you need to get an update on how your credit is doing. There is a small charge from the credit agencies each time you get your credit report, but you can also get your credit report from each agency for free once each year by going to AnnualCreditReport.com. Keeping on top of your credit score will help you build a better financial life, so it is something you should definitely do at least once a year, or more if you’re working on improving your credit. The more you check your credit score, the more quickly you can do the things necessary to move it up to the score you need.

This is the twelvth installment in our credit & debt series. Be sure to check back for updates…

How do you report someone to a credit agency? Have you ever wondered if you could do that? If someone owes you money for some reason, it’s probably a question you have at least pondered. After all, reporting something negative about someone’s financial history to a credit agency can negatively impact their credit score, which can keep them from getting loans, renting apartments, getting cell phone service, and even getting certain jobs. You might feel this type of financial penalty is justified if someone owes you money and isn’t paying.

If you can’t get your money, you can at least make the debtor suffer, right?

Well, it’s not necessarily right. You see, reporting someone to a credit agency is not something just anyone can do. The average person on the street can not report someone to a credit agency. This is true even if you want to report something GOOD (such as if a person owed you money and paid you back regularly and on time until the debt was repaid….being the good Samaritan you are, you may want to help that person’s credit report by reporting the good thing). In actuality, only businesses that have signed up and registered with the credit reporting agencies can report someone to those agencies.

Naturally, this requirement is in place to prevent people from doing things to ruin someone else’s credit out of revenge. Imagine the credit chaos that would ensue if your neighbor that you’re feuding with could report you to a credit agency, or if your ex-boyfriend could do it when you broke up with him? No, it is far better to only allow a registered business to report someone to a credit agency.

It actually costs money to sign up with the credit agencies, and it costs money to report someone to a credit agency, be the report bad or good. Companies have to keep reporting (or updating their reports) for the reports to stay there for the seven years the law allows. A lot of work and cash goes in to reporting someone to a credit agency. That’s why so many companies just let collection agencies do it for them, and why many companies that might otherwise report your GOOD credit history with them do not.

If you are the owner of a business and want to start reporting both good and bad accounts to a credit agency, you’ll have to decide whether to sign up with just one or with all three, then contact the agency or agencies to go through the process of becoming a reporting business. Many businesses that do report just report to one agency because of the cost involved. If you are like most businesses that prefer to save money on what can be a very expensive venture with little to no financial reward for you, you can just hire a collection agency to do the reporting for you. Collection agencies are designed to do that sort of thing. If you want to report someone to a credit agency, there is no better answer for any business, big or small, than to hire a collection agency to do the job. They’ll do it for pennies on the dollar and you don’t have to chase bad accounts.

This is the eleventh installment in our credit & debt series. Be sure to check back for updates…

Your credit score is important and affects a lot of different things you may do, from getting a loan to getting a job. Many different things affect your credit score, making it go up and down accordingly. The higher your score, the better. Higher scores are considered better credit risks and you’ll find it easier to get approved for loans, get good rates on loans, and pass background investigations that involve credit checks if you have a high score.

In addition to paying all of your bills on time and not having any delinquent bills or collections on your credit report, you also want to keep the number of inquiries into your credit to a minimum. The more inquiries that are done on your credit, the lower your score will become, because credit granting agencies feel like people who have a lot of inquiries are looking for credit….and ironically, they don’t want to give you credit if it seems like you’re looking for it.

But you may not always be looking for credit when an inquiry is done on your credit report. You may not even know if someone has done a credit check on you. The first you may know of it is if you’ve previously had no problems with getting credit and then you apply for credit, only to be turned down. While checking your own credit and unsolicited inquiries into your credit from companies looking to send you credit offers do not count against your credit score, other inquiries do count against it.

So how can you tell if someone has done a credit check on you?

The best and easiest way is to simply order a copy of your credit report. Get a copy from all three credit granting agencies if possible (Equifax, Experian, and Trans Union). There will be a section on your credit report that tells you if someone has done a credit check on you. It will show you the date the check was done, the company that did it (sometimes with contact information for the company and sometimes without it), and sometimes the reason for the credit check. If you see a credit check that is affecting your credit score negatively and you did not know about it or authorize it, contact the company that did it to find out why they did it.

If there is no good reason for them doing a credit check on you, dispute it with the credit reporting bureau. Tell the bureau that you did not authorize the credit check and that you want it removed from your credit report. Sometimes you may be successful with this, sometimes you may not be….but if you are successful, you may raise your score, which is a good thing. Whenever you can raise your credit score, the chances of you getting a loan, rent an apartment, or get a job are much higher. So find out who has done a credit check on you and get the credit checks removed if you can. It’s always worth it if it works in your favor. You can buy a lot of nice things with a credit card, but a good credit score, as they say, is priceless.

This is the tenth installment in our credit & debt series. Be sure to check back for updates…

What is a good credit score? That’s an important question these days, since credit requirements are getting a lot stricter. This is because of the foreclosure crisis and general recession that has caused many people to default on their credit obligations. For most people, these defaults aren’t their fault. They have to take pay cuts at work, lose benefits, or lose their jobs entirely, while expenses on other things just keep going up and up. Still, if anyone affected by credit problems now wants to get credit offered to them in the future, their credit score is going to be an important factor.

So, what IS a good credit score? The range of credit scores goes from 300 to 800, with the lowest score being the worst and the highest being the best. Most people fall somewhere in between. However, the higher your score, the more credit offers you will receive, the more likely you will be to be approved for credit, and the better interest rates you will get on that credit.

The median credit score right now is around 680. Anything over 720 is considered excellent and anything under 600 is considered poor. If your score is below 500, then it is very poor. In order to get a house loan with anything other than owner financing or a lease option, you’ll need at least a 620 in most cases (lower scores may sometimes qualify for a mortgage, but will have higher interest rates). To get credit cards, personal loans, car loans, and other types of credit, you must meet the credit requirements of the particular creditor with whom you are applying. Credit requirements differ by creditor by quite a bit, so you’ll always want to check before applying to see if it’s worth it to apply.

There is actually a very good reason to get pre-qualified for credit before applying. Each creditor with whom you apply will run a credit check on you and each credit check on your report lowers your score. You want to keep credit checks to a minimum to maintain a good credit score. Follow smart credit practices, and you can always have credit available to you when you need it.

This is the ninth installment in our credit & debt series. Be sure to check back for updates…

Foreclosure is hitting everyone from the poor to the wealthy these days, so it’s not unusual to see empty, vacant houses in the neighborhoods and lis pendens notices in the public records. If you’ve been hit by foreclosure, don’t feel bad, because you are definitely not the only one. While you may be a bit depressed about having to rent for a while (and let’s face it, you’ll have to), you will almost certainly want to buy a house again one day. So, you may be asking yourself, “How long after foreclosure can I purchase a home?”

The answer to how long after a foreclosure until you can purchase a home depends on what type of loan you’re trying to get. If you have twenty percent to put down on the house, you can often get a conventional mortgage right after experiencing a foreclosure, as long as all of your other financial and credit statuses look good. Of course, twenty percent is a lot, even for a home that’s only $100,000, so you may have to wait until you can save it up.

If you’re buying a house with owner financing or as a lease option, there’s no wait after a foreclosure, either, because you are not going through a bank to get your loan. You will be working directly with the owner of the home to set up your payments, and if you don’t make the payments, the owner simply takes back possession of the house. Your credit is typically not damaged (though you can’t use the owner as a reference for future housing), and your credit is not checked to get this type of financing. With more people facing foreclosure, more owners are offering this type of financing to potential buyers.

This is the tenth installment in our foreclosure series. Be sure to check back for updates…