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.
