Free FICO Score and Credit Report Services

January 12 2017

Do you know your credit score? If not, you are not going to believe how easy it is to get if you have computer or smartphone. The services I lay out below can get you that information in a jiffy for “free”. There are a lot of free services out there to help monitor your credit score and some let you view your credit report as well. Since I started award travel, keeping track of my score has been a little more important to me, but only having one service to check my credit score against made me a little nervous as to the accuracy. For a long time, I just used the credit card companies service that gave you access to your FICO score like Barclaycard’s or Discover. Not all the banks are providing this service like Chase, but I see some later adopters like and USAA, which is bank I use, now getting on board too. The other service I use is Credit Sesame, it was one of the first I used outside of the credit card service mainly to try to gauge what else was on my credit.

There are drawbacks to all these services in my opinion, the main being that there are 3 credit bureaus, Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion and none of the banks or online services I discuss give you your credit score on all 3 for free that is. I guest you can’t be mad being that it is free. I know that my credit score has remained in the range of 750 – 816 despite opening over 17 credit card this past year largely by tracking it on a collection of these free services. This range is considered excellent credit.

I don’t work so hard to maintain great credit at this point because I do the basics to keeping good credit which are paying my bills on time every month and keeping low credit utilization compared to my credit limits. The age of credit history doesn’t ding your score as much as if you get the aforementioned two basics wrong.

Back to the 3 credit bureau, your credit scores on each can vary, so it’s good when you can kind of piecemeal together what each has on you and since no one service gives you the entire picture for free, I use a lot of them. By using these services doesn’t in anyway impact your score. They can serve to let you know when activity that might not be you is happening on your credit by alerting you when a payment is made or inquiry occurred.

It is valuable to know in advance what your credit score is anytime you are thinking about financing a purchase because if you credit history is jacked up they are going to find out about it and probably use it to your disadvantage as far as interest rates they charge you. If you want to be able to do award travel, you need decent credit and if you don’t know ballpark what your credit score is then you are going to do a lot of things detrimental to your financial health. For example, if you apply for credit card, a hard inquiry is made on your credit report and if you are denied because your credit score is in range less than 700, this hard inquiry will contribute to bring down your credit score even more. If you knew your score in advance, you could know that now might be the time to apply for credit.

So use one or a bunch of these services to monitor your credit score and history, and educate you with tools on how to improve your credit. This could make financing be more in your favor when there arises a time for that in the future. It could mean the difference in thousands of dollars being saved.

Here are services I have used or use to get credit score or credit report or both and I describe briefly what each provides on a high level. You can find links to these services under my Affiliate and Referral link here.

Quizzle

free online site that provides access to only TransUnion credit report and credit score with tools you can use to monitor and improve your credit, but the data isn’t as up-to-date.

Credit Sesame

free online site and smartphone app to get monthly credit score and loan information provide by TransUnion, the credit report cost to get. The information on here is pretty current. It doesn’t have a lot of tools to help improve scores, but it does have alert service when there are changes to your credit report pretty quickly.

Credit Karma

free online site and smartphone app to get monthly credit scores and credit reports from 2 of the 3 credit bureaus, TransUnion and Equifax. The information on here is pretty current. The have a great tool called Credit Card Simulator which lets you see what would happen to your current score if you, for instance, got a loan and other education around your credit factors like credit utilization and payment history we discussed above.

Discover
with credit card they provide FICO score and your FICO score history that is provided by TransUnion, but that is about it. The information is pretty up-to-date.

USAA
with banking account they provide Credit Check (Experian) that get your credit score from Experian. Credit reports are not free. They do provide a few tools to help you better your scores and education around your credit factors like credit utilization and payment history we discussed above.

Barclaycard
with credit card they provide FICO score and your FICO score history that is provided by TransUnion, but that is about it. The information is pretty up-to-date.

Experian
free online site and smartphone app to get monthly credit report for free from 3rd credit bureau Experian, but the credit score cost to get. The information on here is pretty current. It doesn’t have a lot of tools to help improve scores.

Mint
free online site and smartphone app to get monthly credit score for free from credit bureau Equifax. The information on here is a little behind. It doesn’t have a lot of tools to help improve scores.

AMEX
with credit card they provide FICO score and your FICO score history that is provided by TransUnion, but that is about it. The information is pretty up-to-date.

I use the following services to get my complete credit picture as far as credit score and report.

Credit Karma give me my credit scores and credit report from TransUnion and Equifax.