Credit Score

We had no clue about our credit until it came time to buy our house in 2004. Our real estate agent advised us to run a credit report to clean up our credit so that we could get the best lending rates. Both Mel and I were a bit surprised to find a lot of inaccurate information, including different name aliases, incorrect addresses, and open accounts that we had no clue about. Mel's credit was particulary bad because one of her aliases had horrible credit history, which was really dragging her credit score down. After we cleaned up our credit we were able to secure our mortgage at the best rate at the time.

This year we decided to run our credit reports again to see how we were doing. For the most part mine was clean except for an additional alias which was a misspelling. I was able to account for all but two of the open credit accounts under my name. So I feel safe that no one has stolen my identity and is opening up accounts using my identity. I've landed myself in the 770s, an improvement of 10 points or so since 2004.

Mel is a different story. Once again her credit was being dragged down by an alias. We expected her score to be close to mine but it was nearly 140 points lower!

Running a credit report annually or every two years helps protect you from identity theft, saves you some trouble when you need to secure the best loan(house or car or whatever), and helps you understand your credit and borrowing power.

We used Experian, but any of the big 3 are nearly the same. In fact, the 3 credit agencies announced yesterday that they would be moving to the same scoring system.