My Lucky Numbers
We're moments away from the largest lottery in world history. However, it's 2016 so people aren't huddled around the television like 60's. Instead we're on every tech item ready Google "Powerball" at 11:00 est. praying we've beaten the odds and won. While over 85% of all possible combinations have been selected in this Powerball. Chances are, you haven't won and need to go on with your life. For those of us that do have to work tomorrow might I suggest you check up on numbers you can control... your credit score?
By now you've probably seen the commercials for Credit Karma which gives a free credit score on an annual basis. However, there are many other (paid) services that provide credit scores via credit monitoring services and credit protections services such as LifeLock, Wells Fargo Identity Theft Protection and ProtectMyID. Don't be fooled by the flash and promises of the sites though, what you're going for is the credit report from the 3 major credit bureaus (Transunion, Equifax and Experian). Since each creditor may choose to report to any 1 or all of the 3 credit bureaus your scores may differ greatly. In my experience Transunion is gets the least reporting and Experian gets the most but your report may vary based on your credit history and usage.
In the picture above the scores from 2 different bureaus calculate differently and note that the range can either be out of 900 or 850 (at least for what's shown in the picture). The scores are from FICO (Fair Issac COrporation) which is widely used across different credit applications. However, there are many different ways to calculate a credit score across different scales and there are different credit bureaus other than the 3 mentioned.
Rather than get caught in the numbers of your credit score review your credit and make sure it's clean of issues and the score will follow. It's almost impossible to calculate what particular thing will get you to an exact score, but it's easy to tell what will increase or decrease your score and for how long.