I’ve sung the praises recently about Credit Sesame and their free credit score from Experian. As good as Credit Sesame is, it’s still only one score out of three and for someone who needs to know their full credit picture, 67% of the picture is incomplete.
Why do you need to know all three credit scores?
If you need to use credit to:
- Buy a home using a mortgage.
- Buy a business using a loan.
- Go to college using borrowed funds.
Chances are very good that any lender will pull your credit and take a peek at your score. Which one? There’s the rub! You’ll need to see all three scores to get a complete picture of your credit reputation and your lender may only pull one score from one of the three main credit bureaus. The problem is, you just don’t know which one.
To make matters even more difficult, though some creditors provide their information to all three credit bureaus and use all three credit reports and scores to make decisions about potential borrowers, other creditors have relationships with just one or two credit bureaus and therefore do not provide information for your accounts to all three bureaus. As a result, your credit report and credit score from different credit bureaus may be different.
