Your credit score is important and for a variety of reasons. Things like determining the interest rate you’ll receive when taking on debt, your insurance rates, tenant applications and more all take that tiny little number into account, most of the time.
There are a lot of websites available that will give you a free credit score, but it’s not actually a FICO® Score, which is what 90% of the top lenders use to determine your credit worthiness. While these other types of scores can be useful and be used as a guide to help you improve your credit, it’s still nice to know the number that the banks will actually see.
But now you can actually check your FICO® score for free, no strings attached. (I tested it.) Here’s how.
What a FICO® Score Is
The FICO® Score was created by the Fair Isaac Corporation and is the most widely used credit score. These scores are based completely off the information in your credit report.
You have three FICO® Scores, one from each of the credit bureaus: TransUnion, Equifax and Experian.
These scores range from 300-850. The higher the credit score the lower of a risk you appear to the bank and you may receive a lower interest rate.
Many of the other websites who offer free credit scores are using the information from your credit reports only they’re using a different set of scoring criteria to assign you a number. This is why when you check your actual FICO® score it’s different than most of the other free scores available.
Get a Free FICO® Score from Discover Credit Scorecard (Open to EVERYONE)
Discover’s latest survey on credit scores indicated that 61% of people who had seen their credit score in the past year had actively worked on improving it. They did things like pay bills on time, pay off credit balances and tried to maintain lower levels of debt.
Discover decided to expand their financial education efforts. They recently launched a new program that allows everyone, not just Discover customers, their FICO® score and breakdown of that score for free.
I went in and created an account with Credit Scorecard just to make sure it was truly free (we’re all skeptics, right?) and it is. It was super simple to sign up and use. It took me a total of two minutes to sign up, verify identity and create security questions.
After that I was presented with a dashboard that showed me my credit score and had tabs across the top that I could click on and it broke down information, told me how important that section was in regards to my credit score and what I could do to improve it.
It looked like this:
(Not my credit score though, in case you were wondering. 🙂 )
Answers to questions you might have:
- The FICO® score they offer is based on your Experian credit history.
- 100% no strings attached.
Overall I give Discover Credit Scorecard an A+. It was easy to sign up, hassle-free, and allowed me to view my actual FICO® score without paying a cent.
If you want to give Credit Scorecard a shot you can visit CreditScorecard.com to sign up.
___________________________________________________
A big thanks to Discover for sponsoring this post. All opinions are my own.
Photo Credit: dedivan1923 / 123RF Stock Photo and kicsiicsi / 123RF Stock Photo
