When they've burned all their freebies from the FTC, I've heard of people applying for loans they know will be rejected just to obtain another free report. I know one or two of the three major bureaus will permit online report access for a whole quarter, which is a cheap way of seeing some updates.
JCB's lament is about the absence of a FICO-type score from these reports. This I think was a compromise struck when the Annual Credit Report program was launched. Never forget the credit bureaus are in business to sell data to commercial entities. Consumers, the sources of those data, are a nuisance to them.
Something Lone Stranger said almost a year ago in the Sears Credit thread here has stuck with me, and is echoed by many others who have protracted credit problems:
"I don't advocate making decisions based primarily on what something does to your credit report."
Funny story -- since that comment, a sharp report was issued by Yuliya Demyanyk of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland which recasts credit scoring as anything but reliable or absolute. The short takeaways are that all scores are relative and are, so to speak, graded on a curve. They don't only reflect individual performance but that of others, sort of like the insurance pricing math. A score of 630 in one place and time is not the same as 630 in another context.
- from the report source:
Your Credit Score Is a Ranking, Not a Score
http://www.clevelandfed.org/research/commentary/2010/2010-16.cfmhttp://www.clevelandfed.org/research/commentary/2010/2010-16.pdfhttp://ideas.repec.org/a/fip/fedcec/y2010inov16n2010-16.html (download page)
- their ploughman's PowerPoint session on the topic (They really need to stop using auto focus and auto iris as the hand changes are made more distracting.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWa34pB3pQA- Here's a Forbes article which matches some of my posture:
5 Credit Myths That Lead to Disaster
http://finance.yahoo.com/banking-budgeting/ar ... ead-to-disaster
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