5 minute read
Hello, beautiful people from across the lands! One of the power moves you can make is finding ways to manage your money and credit. Managing your spending habits and credit helps you stay on top of things. Especially with your credit. Did you know that right now you are able to do WEEKLY credit report checks on annualcreditreport.com until April 2021?! If you have been looking into ways to get your credit in order here are some free tools to get you started on the right path.
Experian Boost
I absolutely love this tool! Experian Boost has helped me improve my credit score over 100+ points, remove negative marks, and closeout collection accounts all for FREE! Read here on how exactly I did it! This tool allows you to gain positive credit by connecting your phone and utility bills. Experian Boost will report all on-time payments to all three credit bureaus, missed payments are NOT reported. This helps in such a major way as your payment history is 35% of your credit score. There is also a dispute center where you can dispute any discrepancies on your credit report. This tool is absolutely amazing and FREE. Check out Experian Boost to help get your credit in the right direction.
Credit Sesame
Credit Sesame is a free tool that allows you to monitor your credit and debt. What is nice about Credit Sesame is that you will get $50,000 in Identity Theft protection for FREE. Alerts are sent providing real-time information on what is going on with your credit. I like how it provides a list of all the items on your report and your debt total. I highly recommend this tool to help you manage your money and credit. There is an app that you can download to make managing even more simple.
Discover Scorecard
Discover Scorecard is a free credit score provided from Discover. You do not need to have a credit card with Discover to utilize this service. I like having the Discover Scorecard as it seem to have the most accurate rating on my FICO score. Updates are provided every 30 days. I like to compare between Experian Boost and Discover Scorecard as they both report the FICO score. This service is free and easy to sign up for.
CreditWise by Capital One
CreditWise is a fairly new tool I came across but offers some great support in managing your money and credit with financial education. This tool offers credit monitoring service by Capital One. It tracks your SSN and scans the dark web for any funny business and sends alerts from two credit bureaus for free. There is also a cool tool called the Simulator which calculates the impact on future financial decisions. Thinking about getting a car or home loan crunch the numbers in this tool it will show how this will impact your score. Now that’s powerful!
Action Steps to Take NOW
There is a lot of information in this post and I do not want you to get overwhelmed and do nothing. Here are some easy steps to help start to manage your money and credit TODAY. This should take no longer than 10-15 mins to complete.
Step 1: Choose at least 2 free tools to monitor your credit. It’s best to compare your scores as some of them pull your information from different credit bureaus.
Step 2: Look over the results the two tools pull and make sure everything is accurate
Step 3: Take note or write down anything that may not be accurate and prepare to dispute or have the information corrected
Conclusion
Signing up for any of these free services will NOT hurt your score. Managing your money and credit is the known cure for “Where did my money go?” syndrome. I know your financial situation may bring up some fear and shame. Know that we all have made mistakes and regardless of what it looks like you can and will do something about it. You’ve already started by reading this blog now! Do not waste another day allowing your money or credit to do whatever it wants. You are in charge and these free resources can help make taking charge easier.
What free resource will try out? Have you already tried some of these tools? If so, how has it helped?
Until next time, dream, believe, and achieve.
