Where is My FICO Score? Some of the reasons why you may not be able to see it
Among the most crucial figures defining your financial situation is the FICO score. This three-digit figure indicates to creditors and lenders your chance of timely repayment of the borrowed money. The FICO score, interest rates, and loan conditions one may get always correlate in some manner. But sometimes you wonder why you can't check the FICO score although you most need it. The typical reasons your FICO score could not be easily available to you are as follows:
What is a FICO Score and why is it important for me to understand it?
Let us first discuss what the FICO score means before we can understand why you cannot see the score. Before we explore the reasons one cannot see the FICO score, we must first know what the score is all about. Fair Isaac Corporation, the company that created the FICO rating system used by most modern banks, is shortened as FICO. Your Fico score shows your chances of becoming 90 days past due or worse on credit obligation during the following 24 months.
The range is from 300 to 850. Most persons fall within the 600 and 750 range, as it is noteworthy. While low scores indicate you are a credit risk—that is, you are probably not going to pay back creditors—the better levels signal low credit risk. The three primary credit bureaus in the United States, Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion, generate their FICO score from the information found in your credit file in their database.
Why You May Not Be Able to Access Your Score
If you have tried and failed to check your FICO score, several scenarios may explain why it was unavailable: If you have tried and failed to check your FICO score, several scenarios may explain why it was unavailable:
Insufficient Credit History
FICO scores require enough of the credit history to be darkened to come up with an accurate assessment of your repayment behavior. If you do not have any accounts or the accounts that you have are very new, then you lack the history that FICO requires. Usually, you need to have at least one credit line and the account should have been active for at least half a year to get a FICO score.
Thin Credit File
It means that even if you qualify for a particular age, then a thin credit file implies that there is not enough data in your credit reports for scoring purposes. For example, if no accounts are reporting and no recent inquiries, FICO models can not measure your actions to create a score. Having more accounts open and active usage reported by creditors increases your file density for score accessibility.
This arrangement renders only having authorized user accounts to be sufficient.
Being included as an authorized user on someone else’s credit card is also advantageous as it will enable one to have a credit history and increase scores. Nevertheless, if you have no account of your own and only the authorized user accounts, you probably will not see your FICO score. Generally, it is mandatory to have at least one account with you as the primary account holder to access the FICO score.
New Within the Past Year
Sometimes, you may struggle to find your FICO score, especially after applying for credit or opening a new account. New activity forces a review of the credit information. Credit scores may not be available for up to 30 days after your reports include new accounts, inquiries, and balances. It should reappear after FICO models process the modified data set again.
Inaccurate Personal Information
Inaccurate personal details on the credit reports also prevent one from accessing the FICO score for a while. When scoring, credit reporting agencies require your correct full Social Security number, residential address, full name, and date of birth. If there are discrepancies or if certain fields are blank in these key identifiers, you might need to correct records through the dispute process first before you see your score.
Unresolved Disputes
At times, one is compelled to challenge the reported data inaccurately by writing official letters to the reporting institutions. If we do not have a resolution to the dispute, the bureaus might not release your score. Likewise, starting fraud alerts or credit freezes impacts score availability until alerts lapse or freezes are removed. It means that sometimes your score might be different from the previous report data in disputes or alerts because models require time to adapt to recalculate a new score.
How to get Problems Checked and FICO Score
If you cannot view your FICO score through online bank account access, credit card sites, or apps, several things you can do to determine why and regain access include: If you cannot view your FICO score through online bank account access, credit card sites or apps, several things you can do to determine why and regain access include:
Look at thin or new credit – Go to AnnualCreditReport. com for your free credit reports and count up the number of open credit lines, the age of your credit history, and recent credit inquiries to see if low credit scores are due to insufficient data. New accounts and repeated uses over six months usually fatten files for scoring.
Review personal information – Check all the headings of the credit reports of the three major credit bureaus for the wrong names, addresses, or dates of birth that would prevent the matching of the information to score dependability. Claim issues with evidence in an attempt to rectify the records.
Wait before the scores re-emerge – Sometimes, scores may take time to resurface after applying for credit, opening accounts, or even reporting errors through disputes. FICO scoring models require some time to reprocess information that has become new; the process may take up to a month.
Obtain credit monitoring – Select either a free or paid credit monitoring service that gives you one or all of your FICO scores. Monitoring allows you to observe your scores daily through services that notify you of significant fluctuations. Although there are free options available that only provide scores every month, the progress can be tracked.
Use the lenders with whom you are currently dealing – Some credit card companies and lenders that accept FICO scores to evaluate their risk, you can call or write to the companies with whom you are doing business and tell them to give you your scores. They may give you your most recent scores at no cost if you ask them to.
In Summary
Being able to see your FICO scores regularly enables you to actively work towards establishing good credit health and getting a favorable loan interest rate by learning how your credit risk is evaluated. If you are one of those who cannot view your scores right now, credit report reviews can inform you of the barriers. At times time along with credit effectively managed in advance can enhance the thickness of your credit file for accurate FICO scoring.
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