Start The New Year Off on The Right Track, Know your credit score

Free Credit Scores Abound

A handful of credit card issuers are betting that you'd like to see your credit score every month. Discover, Barclaycard US and First Bankcard's have started offering their 35 million cardholders free access to their credit scores.

The score they're sharing ? called FICO ? is used by credit card issuers to decide whether to give you a charge account and what interest rate to charge you.

Discover is putting your credit score on your monthly statement. Barclaycard and First Bankcard customers will have to visit their credit card company's website to see their score.

You don't have to open a new credit card account to see your credit score. Credit.com, CreditSesame.com and CreditKarma.com will give you a credit score (without making you pay for credit monitoring services as some other sites do).

The score you get on those sites can be different from your FICO score and from the credit scores used by mortgage companies, auto dealers and other types of lenders.

All credit scores are calculated using information from your credit report, but each type of credit score is based on a proprietary formula devised by the company that sells the score. While different scores have different number ranges they all predict how likely you are to repay.

So if you have good credit based on one scale, you should have good credit based on another credit score's scale, even though the two numbers might be different.

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Contact John Handschuh for "A Hands On Approach To Real Estate"   john@johnhandschuh.com