Knowing your credit score is a number that you should know, much like your phone number or bank account. Thankfully Totally Money makes this FREE, easy and accessible for us all to know and understand this crucial number. Your credit score is a powerful tool in money management which we all need to know because our credit score is the magic key to getting credit for pretty much everything from credit cards, phone contracts to mortgages.
Knowing your credit score and understanding how a credit report works it is really important for several reasons. If there are any inaccuracies on your report it could come back to haunt you in the future. The things that you need to look at:
- New accounts that you don’t recognise. This could indicate that someone has taken out credit in your name.
- Ensure that your addresses past and present are correct as you don’t want to be linked with someone else credit history. Occasionally a debt can be linked to an address and therefore you need to make sure that yours are all correct and up to date.
- Hard credit searches. These are carried out just before credit is agreed or rejected, if there are any hard searches on your credit report it again indicates that someone has attempted to gain credit in your name. Flag this hard searches immediately to protect yourself against identity theft.
- Make sure your personal details are correct including full names and dates of birth. Again any errors can impact on you and therefore need resolving as a priority.
Having a good credit score is important as you need to demonstrate to credit agencies that you are a responsible debt and will be able to meet repayments. Thankfully you can now find out your credit score for free and very easily. Until today I had no idea what mine was and whether I was a good bet.
On my phone I downloaded the free TotallyMoney App available from iTunes or from Google Play Store, if you are on Android, which took just seconds to set up. I confirmed my address and one or two other details and could then see my credit score. I discovered mine was good and I am likely to awarded credit if I ever required it. Using the app was easy to navigate and understand. Once logged in, the credit report uploads and in the center, you are given your score and informed what it is out of. The image makes it easy to read and underneath this figure you can then click onto a second section informing you what credit you are likely to get if needed.
The credit report shows my previous addresses, current mortgage information and my financial connections, which for me is my husband. The report was all accurate but I spotted that it is easy to register a dispute if any of the facts had been incorrect.
The app also shares which credit cards would more than likely be available to me. This would enable me to then check them out and see what rewards are on offer. Letting me be firmly in control if getting the best deal (and rewards) for me.
Additionally, if I ever required a loan, based on my profile, the TotallyMoney app has a clever feature where I could input what money I needed, how long for include my expenses and then it would calculate a deal for me. All this for free!
Having financial knowledge and understanding is really important and these are the tools that we should all have at our fingertips. From my time as a teacher I know that our teenagers want to understand more about everyday finance. They want to understand taxes, mortgages, interest rates and more. This TotallyMoney app gives us some of that information and it is certainly an app worth having on your phone. Do you know what your credit score is and whether it is good or bad? If not there really is no excuse sign up now and find out for free by using this link.
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