The Dangers of Free Credit Reports

You’ve probably been bombarded with offers to see your credit report and score online for free or for a small fee. While reviewing one’s credit report is important the best way to get it is directly from the reporting agencies themselves.
An important thing to remember about these offers is that the score they give you is not your actual FICO score. It’s an approximation commonly known as “FAKO” scores. Unless you are getting the scores from myfico.com you must assume that you are not getting the real score. Although there are a couple of other places to get modified “real” scores. For example, Providian (now WaMu) customers get to see their PFICO when they log into their accounts. This is just a FICO score provided by TransUnion and weighted more heavily on revolving accounts.
But besides the lack of real scores what causes most people problems is that the free reports aren’t really so free. In general, they force you to sign up for credit monitoring services. Essential this emails you whenever a change has been made to your file. I have had several of these services in the past and have found them completely worthless. They tend to be very inaccurate and miss major changes or constantly alert you when nothing has happened. The best way to monitor your credit report is to sign up for an account with TrueCredit.com and keep an eye on it yourself.

My File is Split No More

After a pretty big scare, my Transunion report seems to once again be in order. As a nice side benefit, I got an account that should have been removed a while back dropped. Seems like they simply ask what tradelines you want to reinsert. I listed all of mine that were missing with the exception of a duplicate. Thankfully I have no more negative tradelines but if I did…

Uh Oh! My File Split with Transunion

I logged into my True Credit account for my daily pull and was greeted with a quite unwelcome surprise. About half of my positive tradelines had disappeared. I was aware that daily pulls often caused people’s files to split I never thought it would happen to me. For those of you who don’t know what a split file is let me explain it as simply as possible. Every individual with a credit file takes up a designated amount of space on Transition’s vast collection of computers. As you may have seen when looking at your report, every time you pull your credit it is noted towards the end of the report. Unfortunately, too many of these cause a credit file to exceed the amount of space designated by the computers at Transunion. When this happens the file is split into two smaller files. Unfortunately, you have no way of knowing which version a potential creditor will see and it more than likely leads to a decrease in your score. Bad News. I called the good folks at Transunion this morning and spoke with the Special Handling Department. I was assisted by a friendly rep named Anne who assured me that the file would be merged and fixed before the end of the week most likely in a couple of days. I’ll post about it just as soon as I get a resolution.

Consumer Information from the FTC

Credit repair scams are everywhere. Unfortunately, many people must be falling for them since more and more seem to be popping up every day. I’ve said it before but it’s worth repeating, there are no shortcuts, people offering an instant fix are just looking to rip you off. After all, problems aren’t created overnight so it’s a little naive to assume they can be fixed overnight.