Check The Credit Score

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check the credit score

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Your credit scores are based on the information in those credit reports. Some of that information includes your payment history, credit applications, unsettled debt and any debt collection history. Generally speaking, the higher the score, the better. FICO and VantageScore provide some of the most commonly used scores. But keep in mind that you have many different credit scores that different lenders use.

There are a number of places where you can check your credit reports and scores. Just be aware that some of those places may charge you for the information. To check your credit scores or reports, you could:

Your CreditWise score is calculated using the TransUnion VantageScore 3.0 model, which is one of many credit scoring models. It may not be the same model your lender uses, but it can be one accurate measure of your credit health. The availability of the CreditWise tool depends on our ability to obtain your credit history from TransUnion. Some monitoring and alerts may not be available to you if the information you enter at enrollment does not match the information in your credit file at (or you do not have a file at) one or more consumer reporting agencies.

As Americans stress about making their payments and avoiding credit score damage, they look for professional guidance on how to handle their finances. To provide more insight to worried Americans, WalletHub turned to a panel of experts. Click on the experts below to see their bios and responses to the following key questions:

Anything above 700 generally qualifies as at least a good credit score. Having good or excellent credit enables you to get the best terms on loans, lines of credit and insurance policies. It also pays important dividends in other aspects of life.

Your credit score can change whenever new information gets added to your major credit reports. All credit scores are based on them. And lenders generally send updated account information to the bureaus on a monthly basis. But collections accounts, negative public records and other new info can be added at any time.

You can raise your credit score in a matter of weeks. One of the easiest ways to do so is to reduce your credit utilization. It's reported to the major credit bureaus on a monthly basis and is an important ingredient in your credit score. You can reduce it by paying down debt and/or spending less.

Roughly 87 million Americans (35% of adults) are worried about their credit scores due to the coronavirus, according to WalletHub's nationally representative survey - is that an indication major economic activity such as home/car buying will take longer than expected to bounce back?

Absolutely. A negative factor on a credit score can last for years regardless of whether it was individual or situational. To raise borrowing costs for years to come, and hence reduce borrowing and consumption, merely compounds the challenges facing the economy.

The big-ticket purchases are and will be negatively affected for a while due to the uncertainty related to the health situation. Most of the impact will come from this uncertainty. The declining credit scores will harm these purchases in the medium- and long-run.

In my opinion, credit scores should ignore the payments missed until a few months after the economy reopens. It will take time for people to restart working, so for a few months (say three months) after the economy reopens, there should not be any change in the scores. Of course, the financing institution may look at the situation case by case, they have the right to do that, but they should not see any change in the credit score itself.

I agree that the credit scores shall ignore any payments missed during the coronavirus pandemic because the pandemic is such a sudden, unexpected, and exogenous event to the society/economy. Alternatively, the credit reporting agencies can record two credit scores for each individual, one up-to-date score and another one till the end of February, which excludes what happened after the lockdown.

Roughly 87 million Americans (35% of adults) are worried about their credit scores due to the coronavirus, according to WalletHub's nationally representative survey - is that an indication major economic activity such as home/car buying will take longer than expected to bounce back?

Given how important it is for the economy to bounce back up once the restrictions are lifted and businesses are back up and running, it is likely that we could have legislation that will dampen the impact of missed payments on credit scores. If that does not happen, then yes, major purchases will be negatively impacted by many individuals due to the exogenous shock we are going through. This assumes that individuals have a source of income when we come out of this situation. Democrats are likely to be more receptive to such legislation, however, Republicans will likely oppose it. Most Americans are unable to save enough to pay for an unexpected expense of $400. How can we expect them to withstand what they are going through now, where we have over 30 million individuals that have filed for unemployment insurance? Their source of income has vanished for many Americans. And, for many, it is total household income, other than what they are collecting in unemployment insurance. That number will continue to grow as the \"stay at home\" measures continue in place. And, this number does not capture the true impact of COVID-19 as there are thousands, if not millions, that have chosen not to file for unemployment insurance. Small businesses will close during this crisis and their employees will have to find alternative sources of income, which will not happen overnight. This means that large purchases are likely to remain depressed for a while because people will need sources of income to be able to make these purchases. What I do not know is how this situation will behaviorally change people's spending/savings habits. It is likely that people that suffered through this pandemic, will save more and spend less, to plan for the next pandemic. All this does not bode well for a quick recovery of the US economy. And, if the Congress decides to help jump-start the economy by running large fiscal deficits, we will only shift the pain from today to tomorrow by leaving our children and grandchildren with the burden of paying back those loans.

The credit score is an important source of information about a borrower's past financial behavior, one that lenders should take into account. They use the credit score to manage the risk of their investment activities. In general, I believe the score should reflect one's payment pattern as long as it is a good reflection of how they will behave in the future. Ultimately, that is all the lender cares about - predicting how a borrower will behave in the future. And, since we cannot see the future, we use past behavior as a proxy for future behavior. However, when an unforeseen event impacts a huge segment of the population, for no reason for their own, then one does have to ask whether the past reflects how one will behave in the future. Was this a bad decision on the individual's part, or bad luck? If someone makes a bad decision, I believe their credit score should get negatively impacted. However, in this situation, while lenders need to know what risk they are dealing with, I think a forgiveness policy is called for. Unless lenders expect a pandemic that causes this level of income destruction to happen regularly, they need to treat this as an event that is unlikely to happen anytime soon. And, if they do that, they need to remove missed payments due to this situation. Having said that, if I ran a lending operation, I now have additional risk factors I need to take into account. Businesses and occupations that were once thought untouchable, got shut down for several weeks if not longer. Industry sectors thought to be uncorrelated, all went down together. Countries thought to be uncorrelated went down together. We have landed in a space that no one anticipated or built into their risk models. They will need to, going forward. How this changes risk management and risk assessment, I don't know, but what I can tell you is that it will change going forward. 041b061a72