Does Getting A Credit Report Hurt Score?

How getting a credit report affects your score

Your credit report and your credit score are some of the important parts of your financial life. Employers, landlords, and creditors rely on credit reports and scores at the time of loan application, credit cards, apartments, and even jobs. Therefore, the next step is to check your credit to confirm that the information that is appearing there is correct. However, a question that has been asked often by consumers is, does monitoring one’s credit report or credit score have any negative impact? This feature will look at that in detail.

The Short Answer

As it will be seen shortly the short answer is that there is no way that you can check your credit report or score and it has any negative impact on it. Under federal law, as a consumer, you have permission to obtain one credit report from each of the three major credit reporting agencies namely Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion, without charge, for 12 months. The same is true about checking one’s credit scores; this will not harm one’s credit scores in any way. Instead, it’s better to type in the address bar from time to time to spot mistakes or potential identity theft. As long as an individual is the one who has placed an order for your reports and scores, there are no adverse consequences.

That being said, the following part will delve more into this area.

What Categorized Activities Could Jeopardize Your Scores?

Before explaining why checking your credit doesn't lower your scores, it helps to understand what types of actions damage them: Before explaining why checking your credit doesn't lower your scores, it helps to understand what types of actions can damage them:

Failure to honor obligations such as loans, credit cards, or any other forms of bills. Credit scores depict a person’s ability to pay back borrowed money and hence Payment history is the biggest factor in credit scores.
High amount of credit card usage, and/or utilizing credit cards as if they are a line of credit. This brings your average credit utilization ratio up and down scores.
Taking multiple loans at the same time or applying for multiple credit cards within a short period. From one application, both applicants may benefit, but they can drop scores a few points.
Having a balance on your credit card accounts for a long time or closing down credit card accounts. This can reduce credit history and decrease scores hence taking longer to build up credit history again.

Do not forget that in this list, checking your credit score is not included. Consequently, as long as the individual himself has ordered his reports or scores, this is not considered a negative mark at all under FICO and VantageScore formulas, which are the two most common formulas for credit scoring.

Now here is a glimpse of the fact why checking your credit is not dangerous.

Checking Credit Reports

Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion are the three national credit reporting agencies of the United States and offer one free credit report annually to consumers who request it at AnnualCreditReport. com which is a legitimate website endorsed by the federal government. Using this site to check your reports from each bureau will not harm your scores in any way, but it will also not increase them either.

Moreover, getting your reports from the credit bureaus directly, or merely using a free trial offer, will not decrease your scores either. Through these channels, the consumer has the right to access and monitor his/her credit history without being denied, placed on hold, or charged any fees.

The only time it will show is when someone else is running your credit report without your knowledge. For instance, if an identity thief applies for credit in your name and a credit grantor accesses your credit report, your scores will reduce by a few points in the short term. But if you notice this early enough or report it, the credit bureaus will investigate it.

Checking Credit Scores

As for credit checks, does it mean that it will also take a toll on the credit score? Well, that won’t affect your scores and nope, that’s not a bad thing at all. There are plenty of ways consumers can access credit scores legally including:

Buying the scores from the list of credit reporting agencies directly.
On the Internet credit card companies and banks offer free credit score checks. For instance, Discover Card offers free FICO scores in monthly statements.
The third way of protecting and improving credit is by getting credit monitoring services that include credit scores and credit reports. Some sites have free trial options some are paid ones Some of the sites are free of charge for a certain period with restricted access to some of the features they offer.
You have to buy your scores at consumer-friendly websites such as Credit. com and CreditKarma.

These methods enable you to check your recent scores without any strain, thus you can be assured of your safety as well. To make sure that you, or anyone else, have a good credit score, checking the score does not involve a hard inquiry. Hard inquiries usually occur only when you apply for credit, and this is frequently when you are applying for new credit.

Indeed, checking for the score often is useful to identify when there is an issue or when the score has gone wrong in some way and needs to be corrected before it gets worse.

The Takeaway

Is there any harm done in checking your credit report in terms of your credit scores? To the relief of consumers, the answer is no. It is not detrimental to consumers to check their credit reports or scores. All the times that I have ordered my information, it never comes with a hard inquiry or by deducting points.

However, it is more effective to run credit a couple of times a year to ensure that all the information provided is correct. The prudent thing to do is to check your accounts frequently for frauds and mistakes that fraudsters may be making on your credit. You should therefore be free to safely check your reports and scores as often as you would wish to to deal with your finances.

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