You may have come across adverts urging you to check your credit score for free at Experian and other related platforms. This leads many people to ask - does it mean that if I check my credit score, it will decrease? Well, it is a valid question indeed, especially when your credit score decides whether you will get a loan or a credit card at reasonable interest rates.
However, the short answer to this question is no – you cannot adversely affect your credit score by merely checking it. This is so the case when you obtain your credit score from Experian or any other credit bureau that include Equifax or TransUnion. Here is a brief look at some of the aspects that make it possible to check your own credit report without causing any harm.
How the Credit Inquiries Affect Your Credit Rating
Inquiries can appear on your credit reports whenever anyone checks or ‘inquires’ your credit. However, not all inquiries are equally significant when it comes to scoring an impact. The ones that are likely to reduce your scores for some time are the ones from the lenders when one is applying for credit.
These ‘hard inquiries’ tell scoring models that one might possibly be going for more credit shortly. That is why when you apply for several new credit cards in a short time frame, your credit ratings will drop slightly.
Conversely, when you make preliminary checks on your own credit reports it is termed as “soft inquiries” and do not influence your scores in any way. Regardless of whether you apply for the credit reports or simply authorize companies such as Experian to forward the same to you, these soft inquiries do not affect your scores in any way.
What You Need To Know About Credit Reports
Now that you know checking your own credit reports is score-neutral, here are some reasons why you should review them periodically:Now that you know checking your own credit reports is score-neutral, here are some reasons why you should review them periodically:
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Check the details – There might be some inaccuracies in the reports including identity issues, incorrect bills sent to collections, etc. You have rights to receive a free copy of the report from each of the major bureaus once in a year and then you can check all the accounts and balances you are actually responsible for.
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Prevent identity theft - If somebody has stolen your identity and has been using it to open accounts in your name, you might notice it earlier if you monitor your credit reports periodically. In many cases, the signs of identity theft are usually evident in credit checks that you never ran or accounts opened in your name.
- Track improvement or decline – It enables you to keep track on the progress of your credit report over time. When you are making repayments towards your debts, your scores should improve in the process. Or if you find yourself beginning to receive low scores, your credit reports should give you an idea why this is so.
When to Monitor Your Credit Score
For all the above-stated reasons, it is advisable to monitor your credit by reviewing your reports about three times each year. Always ensure you run checks from Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion since you have to request the report from each of the three separately. You also may have credit reports at specialized consumer reporting agencies if you live in certain states.
The official government site where you can get free annual credit reports is AnnualCreditReport. com. This combined service provides credit reports from the three credit bureaus so that you can order all at once or at different intervals to monitor closely.
Other consumer financial web sites such as Experian also offer free access to consumers’ credit scores and credit reports. Some of these offers differ in the type of data they offer, how frequently, etc. The free or paid credit monitoring services can be used in conjunction with your free annual reports.
One thing you should know when monitoring your credit is that you should not check it often especially before applying for a major credit such as a car loan or a mortgage. It is better to have harder inquiry from that application than any slight difference in your scores as before.
Will getting your credit score from experian hurt it?
Some of the benefits that Experian offers to customers as part of the value proposition include free access to your latest credit scores and reports from their bureau. As explained earlier in this article, merely obtaining your own credit data from Experian or any other credit bureau does not affect your scores.
These inquiries get coded as soft pulls that the credit scoring models do not consider while determining your scores. Therefore, there is no need to panic that your Experian credit report score is going to reduce merely by looking at it.
Experian may also include offers for paid credit monitoring services that one can subscribe to. These provide you with tools that allow for the tracking of your credit reports and scores in real-time online. However – just like before – the mere process of checking your Experian credit score or report in no way affects it.
Another important thing to note is other financial sites offer Experian data as well, but the score may differ. So, FICO Score comes from Experian since it offers its FICO Score 8 based on the information from the bureau. Other sites may provide VantageScore or even the old FICO type and so on as shown in the table. It’s perfectly fine to check your scores on multiple websites, as long as you know that the scores are different due to the different scoring models.
The Takeaway
It goes without saying that it is high time to check your own credit reports and scores as often as possible to observe the state of your financial history, track possible fraudulent operations, and follow the dynamics of your creditworthiness. Fortunately, just requesting and obtaining your credit information by yourself does not harm your credit scores in any way.
That means services like the free insights Experian provides only assist with credit education and nothing more. You do not have to avoid your Experian credit report or score and can check it from time to time. Just make sure you do not apply for many ‘hard credit checks’ in a short period of time such as for new credit cards, since those types of credit checks will reduce your credit score briefly.
