Get paid to check you own credit report
Posted by 2000mph on April 5, 2009
This post has two main points. The first is that you can check you own credit report online for Free and even get some money back for doing so.
Both Experian and Equifax will alow you to sign up online and check you credit report for free, the catch is that you have to SIGN UP to thier credit serivces and are given a free months trial. You are free to cancel this any time so its perfectly fine to check out your credit report and then just cancel the subscription with no charge at all.
The next part is the best bit, you can actually get paid for doing this as many of the cash back sites, such as the one i use www.quidco.com offer you anything up to £5 if you apply for your free credit report through thier site.
The other good thing about checking out you credit report online is that you can see all the details on your credit report and see if it’s all correct making it easier for you to apply for credit, such as mobile phone contracts. One interesting thing I found out by checking my report was that if I provided different variations of my home address I would get different results back. I live in an apartment, with a apartment number, building name, building number and street name, so it’s quite a complicated address, if I provided different variations of the address I would get different results, some bank accounts appeared some were missing, it found my credit cards once but was missing on all the other reports, some times it would pick up I was on the voters register, some times it didn’t.
It very interesting to know all this as you then know exactly what information to give to companies that check your credit score to make sure you get past ok and you can flag up any issues yu see with the credit agency, also getting the cash back for joining a free service was very nice.
Chris said
Good post, Quidco’s great! As I work for Experian, I get CreditExpert for free, can’t say I would use it if I had to pay, but it’s definitely worth signing up then cancelling just to see your credit report and get the cashback
One thing to point out is that you have to pay extra to see your actual credit score which isn’t part of the report itself.
2000mph said
Yes the Cresit Score is not free, but as far as I know the Credit Report has all the details on it that the Credit Score is based on any way and also as far as I know the Credit Score that Experian provide will give you a good idea of your general credit score, but each company that does a seperate credit check will have different criteria to work out your credit score and decide to approve or deline you. If I am wrong about that please feel free to fill me in.
In the end although I found being able to see my credit report for free was useful and Experian customer services were very helpful in trying to sort out my problem, I have given up trying to get a mobile contract as I don’t think I will ever pass the credit check becasue of the problems with my address. Because there are several different formats of my address and every time I put in a different one I get different results, I have already failed twice to get a mobile contract, even though my credit history is perfect. I really really annoyed, but I still rate Credit Expert as a very handy service, without it I would have had no idea at all what was going wrong!
Bob Sherman said
The idea that slight variations in your address produced different details on your credit report is quite interesting.
I’m wondering if these were actually different credit reports or the same credit report. And, were there different credit scores, depending on the items in the report?
I would have thought that all the information would have been tied together based on something like a Social Security Number.
2000mph said
I would have thought the same thing, it would be so easy if all the details were linked by National Insurance Number, but as far as I can tell it isn’t. The Credit Report or Credit Score you get back can be different each time depending on any slight differences in the data you provide at the time.