Let us face the cold hard truth: checking your credit score is scary. I understand that feeling, as the number could be lower than you expect, but failing to check it means losing a lot of money due to increased interest rates. It is time to stop guessing and educate yourself.
There is nothing stopping you from accessing your credit report for free. There are lots of companies that are trying to sell you a service of a credit report monitoring, but there is no need to pay for it. Today is an era of data, and data is accessible to everyone, not only to the premium users of Experian and Equifax.
You have two definite ways of accessing it depending on your goal. If you want to know your score from the lender’s perspective, head straight to AnnualCreditReport.com. Educational scores provided by fintechs, Credit Karma and your Amex account, are very helpful to get a general idea about your score, but remember that they may differ from your real FICO score.
Once you access the site, choose to view all three reports at once. Pay particular attention to the “Accounts” section as there might be lots of mistakes that you do not suspect. You may find your accounts marked as being late in payments, which could be critical to your business loan application. Do not ignore this stage because of the technicality of the interface.