The Credit Report Card: An Overview

Last Tuesday, Credit.com released its Credit Report Card at Finovate 2009, where we won Best In Show. The tool not only summarizes your credit report into easy-to-understand language and graphics, but it also predicts what your credit scores would be across a variety of common scores sold to consumers. These scoring models include the FICO® score, VantageScore, PLUS score, TransRisk score and CreditXpert score. All this is free to the consumer, which is nice considering the word “free” seems to have lost its meaning, especially in the credit products world. Until Credit.com redefined the term, “free” really meant “conditionally free for a couple of weeks, and then when you forget to cancel a subscription, it’s ceases to be free.”

The Credit Report Card interprets your credit file just like a credit scoring model would. And rather than simply giving you another credit report product, we felt that giving you the same type of interpretation would be more valuable, especially considering that well over half of the U.S. population can’t even guess their credit scores within 50 points. These 50 points are often the difference between prime and subprime terms and could be the difference between an approval and a denial. Understanding where you stand, score-wise, may not only save you money on your interest rates, but it may also save you the embarrassment of a denial.

There are five generally known areas of credit evaluation: payment history, debt usage, credit age, credit shopping, and account diversity. The Credit Report Card grades your performance in each of those five areas and offers an overview as to why you graded well or poorly in each category. I can tell you that this method of evaluation is an eye-opening experience for the consumers who have tried out the Credit Report Card. We’ve gotten serious feedback from consumers who have NOT done well in certain areas, wanting to know a) why and b) what they can do about it.

The Credit Report Card is available at https://www.credit.com/r/credit-report-card and is really, truly, 100% free. You won’t be asked for a credit card or any other method of payment. Check it out and please give us any feedback or suggestions.

John Ulzheimer – Credit scoring and credit reporting expert and author, John is the President of Consumer Education for Credit.com. Formerly with Equifax and Fair Isaac, John shares his unique insight of the inner workings of credit scoring models and the credit reporting industry on CreditBloggers.com.