The Importance of Checking Your Credit Score
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I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty careful when it comes to my credit rating. I always make sure that my payments are in a couple of days before they’re due just to be on the safe side, and I even pay a little extra, when I get a bonus or overtime.
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You would think that would make me a pretty safe prospect for any bank wouldn’t you?
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Well, that’s what I thought.
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And as I’d never had any problems getting loans or mortgages in the past, I figured that was what the bank thought as well. I mean they were always sending letters telling me how much I could borrow so I figured they were happy to have my business.
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Anyway a couple of years ago things were going well at work, and we decided to buy a new SUV and that’s when I discovered what happens when you have bad credit.
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I’d call the bank and told them what we were planning and asked them to get the paperwork ready, so we could drop by and sign it. After all it was only 2 weeks before they had told me what a great customer I was and wanted to know what they could do to help.
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I was stunned when I got a call from them telling me that my credit rating wasn’t high enough for the loan I wanted.
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That was crazy. I’d never missed a payment, never defaulted on a loan, and I’d just had a raise – how could I not be good for the same money I’d borrowed 2 years before?
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That was when I discovered that clumsy typing can wreck your credit score!
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Long story short, someone at the bank had typed in the figures for my last loan as being $152 instead of $125 and the computer had decided I was a slow payer. For some reason, no one had spotted it and all the time my credit rating was sinking through the floor.
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It took a couple of weeks to sort it out but eventually the bank put things right and gave me the loan, but it showed me the importance of checking my credit report every year. You can get a copy of your credit report free from Experian as well as a free copy of your credit score. However, there’s something else that’s on offer and that’s a free trial of a credit monitoring service.
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I hadn’t heard about it before the bank mix up, but I’m glad I have now because it’s a service where the company keeps an eye on all the activity on your credit file each day and if anything changes, they email you within 24 hours to tell you about it.
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If I’d had it before I wouldn’t have had a couple of weeks delay in getting my new auto, and I certainly wouldn’t have had the stress that went with that delay. Even so, I just keep thinking what if had been fraud instead of a typo? I wouldn’t have known until too late and my credit rating would have been trashed for years!
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I suggest you get your free credit report and your credit score and check out the free credit monitoring trial to get yourself the peace of mind I’ve got now. You can get the details by clicking the link below.
How do you sit financially? Click Here to get your Free Credit Score.
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