Free Credit Report Review

Having just started my own LLC, I was rejected for a credit card and had no idea why...given the fact that I have never missed a single credit card payment in my life. My banker suggested that I get a free credit report from Experian - something I haven't done in literally 5 years. I searched the 'net for "free credit report," and nothing other than FreeCreditReport.com came up first, so I tried it out. Hopefully this review helps for anyone else who has been in my situation!

It's important to note that I actually have one year of free suspicious activity reporting from credit agency Experian, since my personal information and credit card number "may or may not have been on a laptop that was stolen" at a facility that mangaged one of my accounts. Lovely.

Regardless, I came across this free credit reporting service. After a pretty painless process of creating a user account at Free Credit Report, the service asks you for your credit card information, as it's needed for verification purposes. Once you're in, you can go to your Account Summary dashboard, which gives you a quick view of the stuff you need to know immediately: your credit score, an interpretation of it, and a monthly "Plus Score" scatter graph which automatically updates.

With Free Credit Report, your "Plus Score" is just a fancy name for your credit score. It falls within 330 (the worst score on the scale) to 830 (flawless), and is determined by the risk level of your spending habits and cusion of available credit vs. credit limit (this shows lenders that you are not known to overspend), your history of paying bills on time, and your average credit limit (if your credit card companies have been giving you higher credit limits, it says a lot about how upstanding of a customer you are).

Free Credit Report's "Credit Center" is another dashboard that presents several profiles - all of which you'll want to save to your computer, AND print out for filekeeping purposes:

• The Credit Summary report breaks down your payment history and delinquent payments on everything from real estate to banking and installments
• A Public Records report of information that stays on your credit report for 7-10 years (most people do not have a public records report...it typically contants information about tax liens, judgments, bankruptcy records and overdue child support records)
• Credit Inquiries history report: This contains info about accounts you've opened up in the past. All of the positive stuff is permanent.
• An Account History report, which shows all of the bank accounts & credit card accounts you've ever opened in the past
• Finally, your Credit Score is presented in numerical format, along with an exlpanation of what it means, and even a slider chart that further explains the credit score in detail, including what it looks like after facing specific financial issues.
  

Free Credit Report lets you export your entire credit report in a convenient PDF. It's about 10 pages long, and includes information from all 3 credit reporting agencies. All information discussed above appears in the report, and it also has a 24-month spread that displays your payment history. Each month in this chart is labeled either as "OK", "ND" (for No Data) or it denotes the number of days late a payment was for that pay period.

Each bank listed in your credit report has a detailed account of your payment and account status, terms and conditions, and other related data.

In all, I was simply looking to get a copy of my free credit report to send over to Chase Bank. I found the service to be pretty decent - it's not typically the sort of thing I ever particularly considered subscribing to, but being able to see your own credit report for ALL THREE credit agencies is something you should do, even if it's once in your life. It will clear up any misconceptions you've had from past job interviews (they check your credit, you know), bank issues, concerns about security or identity theft, or just general paranoia -- we all suffer from it, sometimes.

In closing, Free Credit Report gives you all of the stuff you need to know, along with guides that explain things further. Regardless if you're looking to download your free report and be done with it forever, or subscribe for a little while to monitor your performance after one of your financial accounts have been compromised, like mine was, it's a worthy service.

*However, not all is rosy... if you're simply looking to get a free credit report and be done with it, it's not that easy. When you generate your free credit report wiht FreeCreditReport.com, your account will be created and you will automatically begin membership after your trial period is over. There is no option to cancel your membership unless you call their number. Upon doing so, the FreeCreditReport.com representative will attempt a hard sell, where you have to constantly reject their offers as they keep attempting to make the offer sound more "attractive" as you keep rejecting them. They're running off your typical scummy sales template. As you may have guessed, nothing is truly free these days - at least, not without a lot of headaches.