Annual Credit Report Article

Understanding Your Credit Score

If you are not aware of your credit score and plan on applying for a credit card or buy a house, you will certainly find out your credit score quickly. Your lender will request that information.

Your credit score is based on a variety of elements including your history of making payments, the amount of debt that you have, how long you have obtained credit, if you are a new creditor and the types of credit you have had and used in the past.

The 3 large credit bureaus, Equifax, Trans Union and Experian, manage and formulate the credit scores. Each one has a different means of determining the individual’s overall credit score.

As you know, or will find out your credit score is very important. When a lender is considering loan money to you, they put themselves at risk that you will not pay them back in a timely fashion or at all. However, they are collecting interest, which is essentially how they are paid back.

So the creditor is investigating you to determine if you are a good credit risk or not. They will request your credit score and then make that determination.

If you have a low credit score you will pay a higher interest rate and you will have a harder time obtaining credit. However, a high credit score will mean lower rates and low monthly payments.

Credit scores are an easy way for lenders to obtain a lot of information about quickly so that they can make a fast decision. If you are applying for a loan, you will certainly want to know as quickly as possible if you are approved or not.

The object is to keep credit scoring objective free. So decisions are not made based on a person’s sex, religion or other factors which may be perceived as discriminatory.

This helps streamline the process and make it quick and relatively painless for everyone involved.