Free Credit Rating Report
Have you ever known that you can get a free credit rating report? Do you even know what that is? Well, I am here to enlighten you about this.
The free credit rating report is a document that contains all the records of your credit transactions. This is what financial companies, banks and credit card institutions use to determine whether one is at a good risk i.e. one can be eligible for more credit facilities.
If you have ever applied for a loan and it was rejected is because of a bad credit report.
“So,” you may ask, “what is the whole point of knowing about the credit report? And if you cannot have access to credit, what should one do about it?”
The importance of getting your free credit rating report is to help one turn around their financial affairs. The information included in this document can help one think about their spending habits and change accordingly.
This is the source of improving the credit rating so that one can have access to loans.
This means that if your free credit rating report has a score in the region of 620, then the chances of getting a loan with good low interest rates are greatly reduced. One of the factors that lead to a higher credit score is paying for credit transactions on time.
Timely payments are of great importance and will earn one good scores on their credit ratings.
One of the things you can do after getting the credit report is to make sure that no one has stolen your identity and is running up credits into your name. This is the foremost reason that the legislation of giving free credit rating reports was introduced.
The problem of theft identity was on the increase and something had to be done. The Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions (FACT) Act of 2003 was made and passed to specifically handle this issue of theft identity.
This Act allows the credit card holders to see their credit reports up to twice in a year. The card holders can check the reports for inaccuracies and mistakes.
In the same legislation, the 3 credit reporting companies that were charged with the responsibility of giving these free credit reports were Equifax, Trans Union and Experian.
It is possible for any credit card holder to get a free report from any of these companies. All the 3 companies are similar but work independent of each other thus there is a slight difference in the methods of giving the reports.