Financial Matters and Credit Reports

As one who deals in business and individual tax matters as well as the resulting financial disclosures in my investigations, I see numerous folks that do not even know where they stand financially in terms of credit and creditworthiness. In addition, it is always wise to do an annual check of your credit reports due to the identity theft crisis we currently have.

For everyone, I would recommend obtaining your and your family's credit bureau reports once a year. In many states, the credit bureaus are required to provide a free credit report annually. In addition, do not pay the fee for your composite credit score since it can run close to $25.00 for the three scores.

I like the following links for their services:

Credit Bureau: https://www.annualcreditreport.com/cra/index.jsp

Credit Score: http://www.creditkarma.com/

Both sites are free.

Annual Credit Report has made it easy to pull all three credit bureau reports without having to sign into each one individually.

Credit Karma pulls the credit scores from each of the three credit bureaus and gives you a composite score plus they offer suggestions and tips on how to improve your score.

Hhmmmmm Very interesting

This forum is a good resource for all credit related issues and rebuilding your credit.

http://creditboards.com/forums/index.php?act=idx

I also work in the financial arena (banking) and I couldn't agree more with Demon. I meet people every day that have little or no idea of their credit score or how to improve it if it is lower than they would like.

I recieve a credit report every 6 months from my bank. All of mine are sitting at 700 or better. The way I understand it is that frequent use of a card affects one of the three they have been checking. Since I stopped using my card so much I noticed a considerable drop in that one. The others I don't know what they deal with but those are still on the up and up. Well that's all I know. lol