Free Credit Report and Credit Score Offers

[squiffy]

Sossman recently informed us that you can get a free credit REPORT at www.annualcreditreport.com

You can get 1 free report each year from each of the 3 agencies. So you can rotate every 4 months and monitor your report.

Experian also offers a 30 day free trial for a credit monitoring service. With that you can also get your free SCORE. Then if you cancel within the 30 days it's free.

As far as I can tell, they only post a new score and new data once a month, so it's not clear to me that it makes any sense to keep the service for the 30 days, unless I suppose you start up in the middle of one month, and want to check your score through two months, and then get two scores and two reports.

Sossman, is this how it works?

Anyway, I also noticed that BofA is offering a similar service with a 30 day free trial. So this may be one benefit of having multiple bank accounts. Each of your banks may be offering this 30 day free trial. And you might be able to hop from free offer to free offer, cancelling within the 30 days, and getting say two free reports, one on 2/15/07 and one on say 3/1/07.

Sossman or anyone else who knows, how often do the credit agencies recalculate your score? Is it always the beginning of the month? Or does it depend on the agency?

Does anyone else know of other banks that are offering this kind of teaser?

I assume that if experian is making this offer directly AND through BofA, that I will still be able to get both free trials. But I am not sure.

[SossMan]

[ QUOTE ]
Sossman recently informed us that you can get a free credit REPORT at www.annualcreditreport.com

You can get 1 free report each year from each of the 3 agencies. So you can rotate every 4 months and monitor your report.

Experian also offers a 30 day free trial for a credit monitoring service. With that you can also get your free SCORE. Then if you cancel within the 30 days it's free.

As far as I can tell, they only post a new score and new data once a month, so it's not clear to me that it makes any sense to keep the service for the 30 days, unless I suppose you start up in the middle of one month, and want to check your score through two months, and then get two scores and two reports.

Sossman, is this how it works?

Anyway, I also noticed that BofA is offering a similar service with a 30 day free trial. So this may be one benefit of having multiple bank accounts. Each of your banks may be offering this 30 day free trial. And you might be able to hop from free offer to free offer, cancelling within the 30 days, and getting say two free reports, one on 2/15/07 and one on say 3/1/07.

Sossman or anyone else who knows, how often do the credit agencies recalculate your score? Is it always the beginning of the month? Or does it depend on the agency?

Does anyone else know of other banks that are offering this kind of teaser?

I assume that if experian is making this offer directly AND through BofA, that I will still be able to get both free trials. But I am not sure.

[/ QUOTE ]

Your score is a snapshot of that day. The bureaus simply take the information given to them by the subscibing companies and throw it into their giant computer and it spits out a score. It can change daily since not all companies report on the exact same day. That also accounts for the difference in scores between the bureaus, since some companies report to less than all three bureaus as well as report to different bureaus at different times of the month.