How to get your free credit reports

How to get your free credit reports

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How to get your free credit reports

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How to read and understand your free credit reports

This date may not reflect recent changes in individual terms.

If you’re looking for where to find your free credit reports, you’ve come to the right place.

Credit Karma offers free credit reports from two of the three major consumer credit bureaus, Equifax and TransUnion.

But if you’ve never seen your credit reports before, you may not understand what you’re seeing.

Let’s review what you can find on your credit reports and how that information can affect your credit scores and overall financial health.

What’s on my credit reports?

Your credit reports contain personal information as well as a record of your credit history.

Lenders and creditors report account information, such as your payment history, credit checks,

and credit account balances, to the three major consumer credit bureaus.

All of that information can end up on your credit reports.

Much of the information in your credit reports can affect your chances of being approved for a credit card,

mortgage, car loan, or another type of loan, as well as the rates you’ll get.

Even landlords can look at your credit when deciding whether or not to rent to you.

Let’s take a look at some of the main components of your credit reports.

Personal Information

The personal information you may find in your credit reports includes your name, address, date of birth,

Social Security number, and any jobs you may have had.

The credit bureaus use this “personally identifiable information” to make sure it really is you, but it has no bearing on your credit scores.

In fact, federal law prohibits credit scores from taking into account personal information

such as your race, color, gender, religion, marital status, or national origin.

That said, it is not necessarily true that the US financial system is unbiased,

or that lending and credit scoring systems do not consider factors affected by bias.

To learn more about racial justice in lending and initiatives seeking to create change,

connect with organizations leading the fight, like the ACLU.

Credit account information


Most of the information in your credit reports focuses on your credit accounts.

Lenders typically report on every account you’ve opened with them,

so you can expect to see information about credit cards,

car loans, mortgages, or other types of loans you’ve opened.

And there can be quite a bit of information related to each credit account.

This information may include your payment history, your loan amount or credit limit,

your current account balance, and account age.

These account details are all factors that affect your credit scores, so they can have a big impact on your credit and financial standing.

Credit Checks


There are two types of credit checks that can appear on your credit reports: hard credit checks and soft credit checks.

Usually, when you apply for credit, a hard credit check (also known as a “hard credit inquiry” or “hard credit check”) occurs.

This happens because a lender or credit card issuer checks your credit as part of your lending decision,

and you usually need to authorize them to do so.

A single hard credit check may have only a minor impact on your credit scores,

but a large number of new inquiries in a short period of time could make you appear like a risk to potential lenders.

In some cases, multiple hard credit checks are treated as a single inquiry, for example when you are looking for a car or home loan in a short period of time.

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