Some sites give you your credit report free, but you must sign up to their credit monitoring service to get it. You are allowed one free copy of your credit report by a creditor who rejects you, otherwise it's $7.95 from most sites. Your credit report appears online, and shows who has checked your credit history too. You'll see many inquiries with no credit issued and this hurts your chances of qualifying. You must have all these unauthorized inquiries removed from your credit report, especially from car dealers who checked your credit while you were out on a test drive. See our review of Fresh Start below, that tells you how to do this. Usually credit bureaus want to know your address, previous address, SS#, employer, the usual, to get your credit report. Many errors can be quickly removed with a phone call to your creditor. You MUST have a copy of your credit report if you've never seen it before. Show up at a dealer before obtaining your credit report, and you are in big trouble. You might as well just give them your checkbook. A car dealer should never know more about your finances than you do, and besides, you might find an error in your report. This puts you at a disadvantage when the dealer calls 2 weeks after the sale to say "financing fell through, we need more cash" and they blame some black mark on your credit history. |