Why Is It So Important To Get Help Fixing Credit Score Issues?

When you have a problem with your computer, washing machine, or car, the first thing to do is call someone to help with the problem.  Most of us are not experts in these areas, but more than likely we know who to call when a problem occurs.  Unfortunately, when we are trying to get help fixing credit score issues its not as easy. 

The importance of getting help fixing credit score issues that you can be facing when dealing with finding a way to fix any problem that you might have regarding your credit score.  This site is here to help the ordinary person, just like you, to know what to do, where to look, and who to talk to about these issues.  The following information is from an issue of USA Today, and will begin a series on this site that will help you when trying to answer some of these difficult questions.  Let’s start by reading a the following scenario regarding a credit issue that many ordinary people face.

As seen in USA TODAY, November 28, 2007

By Byron Acohido And Jon Swartz

SEATTLE —

·      Like many consumers, Wendy Temple’s first step shopping for a mortgage was to go online to get a sense of where she stood as a prospective borrower.

·      Temple, an accountant, surfed to TrueCred- it.com, a popular website owned by Tran- sUnion, one of the Big Three credit bu- reaus. There she purchased her TransRisk credit score, TransUnion’s assessment of her credit worthiness. Temple thought her score — 608 — was just high enough for her to qualify to buy a $207,000 home in a gated community in Holiday, Fla.

·      “I was so excited,” says Temple, who signed a purchase agreement with her fiance. But not for long. The mortgage company, it turned out, judged Temple, 33, differently. It looked at her FICO score, the assessment widely used by lenders, based on a for- mula supplied by Fair Isaac. Temple’s FICO score was nearly 100 points lower than her TransRisk score. “Needless to say, we had to back out of our contract,” she says.

·      Temple didn’t know that TransUnion and the other bureaus are trying to wrest con- trol of the credit-scoring market from Fair Isaac. She had no way of knowing the com- peting scores differed. But who can blame her? Confusion awaits any consumer who dares tread online in search of a credit score, personal finance experts say. “It’s one of the biggest rip-offs you can find,” says credit consultant John Ulzheimer, au- thor of You’re Nothing But A Number: Why Achieving Great Credit Scores Should Be On Your List of Wealth Building Strategies.

·      Misleading credit scores aren’t the only snare. Consumers are also getting tricked into paying for basic credit reports before obtaining the ones they can get free, as mandated by the federal government in 2003. The only place those free reports are available is at AnnualCreditReport. com, run jointly by the Big Three (Expe- rian, TransUnion and Equifax).

·      Yet, dozens of websites affiliated with the bureaus falsely imply that they can also distribute the government-mandated free reports. At FreeCreditReport.com, ConsumerInfo.com, PrivacyMatters.com, Free3BureauCreditReport.com and other similarly named websites, free trial of- fers and package deals abound. The most ubiquitous: pitches for free credit reports and free credit scores if you subscribe to a “credit monitoring” service that alerts you each time a lender checks your credit history, says Robert Mayer, a University of Utah professor who has analyzed two dozen such sites for Consumer Reports We- bWatch. “The word ‘free’ is used so freely that it really has no meaning in the context of these types of sites,” Mayer says.