Free online credit report North Platte

Sign up for USA TODAY's Personal Finance e-mail newsletter. Every Friday, you'll get a week's worth of USA TODAY's personal finance news and columns. The experienced columnists and reporters at free online credit report North Platte USA TODAY give you the news free online credit report North Platte you need and advice you trust. Temple, an accountant, surfed to TrueCredit.com, a popular website owned by TransUnion, one of the Big Three credit bureaus. There she purchased her free online credit report North Platte TransRisk credit score, TransUnion's assessment free online credit report North Platte of her credit worthiness.

Temple thought free online credit report North Platte her score 608 was just high enough for her to qualify to buy a $207,000 home in a gated community in Holiday, Fla. WATCH OUT: Typos can lead you free online credit report North Platte to imposter credit sites "I was so excited," says Temple, who signed a purchase agreement with her fianc. The mortgage company, it turned out, judged Temple, 33, differently. It looked free online credit report North Platte at her FICO score, the assessment widely used by lenders, based on a formula supplied by Fair Isaac.

Temple's FICO score was nearly 100 points lower than her TransRisk score. "Needless to say, we had to back out of our contract," she says. view free credit report Temple didn't know that TransUnion and the other bureaus are trying to wrest control of the credit-scoring market from Fair Isaac. She had no way of knowing the competing scores differed. Confusion awaits any consumer who dares tread online in search of a credit score, personal finance experts say. "It's one of the biggest rip-offs you can find," says credit consultant John Ulzheimer, author of You're free online credit report North Platte Nothing But A Number: Why Achieving Great Credit Scores Should Be On Your List of Wealth Building Strategies. Consumers are also getting tricked into paying for basic credit reports before obtaining the ones they can get free, as mandated by the federal government in 2003. The only place those free reports are available is at AnnualCreditReport.com, run jointly by free online credit report North Platte the Big Three (Experian, TransUnion and free online credit report North Platte Equifax (EFX)). check my credit Yet, dozens of websites affiliated with the bureaus falsely imply that they can also distribute the government-mandated free reports.

At FreeCreditReport.com, ConsumerInfo.com, PrivacyMatters.com, Free3BureauCreditReport.com free online credit report North Platte and other similarly named websites, free trial offers and package deals abound. The most ubiquitous: pitches for free credit reports and free credit scores if you subscribe to a "credit monitoring" service that alerts you each time a lender checks your credit history, says Robert Mayer, a free online credit report North Platte University of Utah professor who has analyzed two dozen such sites for free online credit report North Platte Consumer Reports WebWatch. "The word 'free' is used so freely that it free online credit report North Platte really has no meaning in the context of these types of sites," Mayer says. The profusion of websites hawking credit reports, credit scores and free online credit report North Platte credit monitoring to consumers have one thing in common: They all sell data supplied by the Big Three. The bureaus are the drivers behind free online credit report North Platte a blizzard of consumer promotions for credit reports (a record of how you pay your bills); credit scores (a calculation of your creditworthiness, based on your credit report); and credit monitoring (a monthly subscription service, which credit experts say is of marginal value). free credit report by mail Thanks to the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act of 2003, each bureau must supply every consumer with one free credit report a year. But while meeting the minimum requirements of this federal mandate, the Big Three have been energetically tapping online shoppers for hundreds of millions of dollars of fresh revenue and free online credit report North Platte profit. By selling credit data via websites that use "free credit report" and "free credit score" as inducements to sign up for credit monitoring, which has become a cash cow.