Free Credit Score Without Credit Card
Getting a free credit score with a credit card is extremely easy, all you need to do is to sign up for one of the many credit monitoring programs that offer a free score when you sign up. Then all you do is cancel within the trial period and you’ve gotten your score without paying a cent for it.
Getting your free credit score without using a credit card is considerably more difficult. You have a few options and we’ve listed these below:
How To Get A Free Credit Score Without Credit Card
1. Apply For A Loan
As of the 1st of January, 2011 if you apply for a loan and are denied or not offered the best rate of interest then legally you are entitled to see the credit scores that the lender used to determine your application. The problem with this is that ideally you want to find out what your credit score is BEFORE applying for a loan. If your in the process of repairing your credit then applying for a loan each time you want to check your score is simply not an option as each hard inquiry (applying for a loan counts as a hard inquiry whereas checking your credit score doesn’t) will cause your credit score to drop by between 5 and 50 points.
2. Credit Karma
Credit karma is a website that was set up to help people improve their credit, one of the best features of the site is that they allow you to get your credit report (it’s not your real credit report – they simply access this and then giving you a scoring grade between A-F for each section) and credit score through Transunion for free – they also offer you tools to let you track and optimize your score over time. The problem with this is that the credit score they offer you isn’t the TransUnion FICO score which is what lenders use, it’s either the TransUnion VantageScore or a new scoring algorithm that was designed especially for Credit Karma. Because of this there can sometimes be huge discrepancies between your real credit score and the score credit karma shows.
3. Quizzle
Quizzle is very similar to Credit Karma, but rather than partnering with TransUnion they are actually partnered with Experian. One of the big differences is that Quizzle gives you access to your full Experian credit report for free as well. The score they give you is similar to one that lenders use, but it’s not exactly the same as the information they are pulling is for ‘Educational’ purposes (and thus a soft inquiry not affecting your credit score) rather than a loan inquiry.
If you only want your credit report and not your score, then all you need to do is go to the official site (annualcreditreport.com) and request one. Everybody is entitled to one free copy of their report every twelve months (from each bureau).