Unless you’re planning to buy a car or a house in the very near future, chances are you’re not putting fixing your credit score at the top of your to-do list. Whether you just don’t care about your credit score right now or you’re too afraid to check your score, your credit score is extremely important if you’re planning on establishing a solid financial future.
Checking your credit score doesn’t have to be painful. Even if your score is lower than you’d ever imagine, there are so many tools and resources out there that can help you turn your credit score around.
One of the top tools that you can use is Credit Sesame, a completely free to use site that allows you to check your credit score and get personalized suggestions on ways that you can improve your score.
To help you get started on your path to financial success, here’s how to check your credit score for free right now, brought to you by Money Mommy.
Why Your Credit Score Is Important
Your credit score plays a vital role in making large purchases, securing loans, and opening lines of credit, but it can also play a major part in other areas of your life as well.
Are you thinking of switching to a new cell phone provider? Chances are they’ll check your credit score.
Changing your utility provider or signing up for new internet services? Get ready for a credit check.
More and more consumer services require credit checks prior to establishing service. If you don’t have a strong credit score, you may end up paying a higher deposit for those services.
Potential employers may also check your credit score, and while it isn’t common to be denied a job in the private sector, you might have a tough time securing a public sector job with a low credit score. In fact, if you’re in a public sector job that requires a high level of security clearance and your credit score drops below the acceptable threshold, you can lose your security clearance and impact your employment status.
Finally, a higher credit score makes it so much easier to borrow money. The higher credit score you have, the better interest rate you’ll get on credit cards, personal loans, student loans, car loans, mortgages, and so much more.
Just by making the right financial decisions, you can save potentially tens of thousands of dollars over time when you secure a lower interest rate due to a solid credit score. You can’t start making those financial decisions if you don’t check your credit score for free first.
Set yourself up for success by signing up for Credit Sesame today.
Checking Your Credit Score With Credit Sesame
Credit Sesame makes it easier than ever to check your credit score for free. It takes just a few minutes to get signed up to view your up to date credit score online.
Simply enter some personal information such as your name, email address, and address. When you complete your signup, you’ll be taken to your personalized dashboard to view your score and get personalized suggestions on improving your score.
One of the best parts about Credit Sesame, aside from the fact that it’s free, is that it has no impact on your credit score when you sign up.
The Credit Sesame Dashboard
Credit Sesame’s comprehensive dashboard is very easy to use and understand, giving you a snapshot of your credit score, your credit score potential, and your credit score history.
What’s unique about Credit Sesame is that it shows your current credit score as well as what your credit score could be if you follow their personalized suggestions. This second score, called your Sesame Potential, makes it easy to set realistic, manageable goals for your credit score and financial future.
Directly below the credit score snapshot are your personalized suggestions on ways that you can improve your credit score. This may include opening a new line of credit to increase your overall credit availability, paying down a portion of your debt, or creating a payment strategy to ensure that your payments are on time.
Ways to Boost Your Credit Score
There are plenty of ways to improve your credit score, with some methods proving more impactful than others.
When you check your credit score for free using Credit Sesame, you’ll be able to see how many on-time payments you’ve made, your overall credit utilization compared to your total amount of credit available to you, the number of accounts you have, and so much more.
Paying your accounts on-time is the most important step in maintaining a high credit score. Missed payments can decrease your credit score by over 100 points if the payment is late by just 30 days.
Payments that are 60 days late, 90 days late or 120 days late can cause your score to drop even further. Letting an account go into collections can have long-lasting negative impacts that can take years to fall off of your credit report.
Simply creating a plan to pay your accounts on-time is an easy to way to improve your score in the long-run. Paying your accounts on time isn’t a strategy that’s going to provide immediate results, but the longer you pay your accounts on time, the bigger the boost to your credit score you’ll see.
Finally, you should try to keep your credit card utilization to under 30% of your total available credit. The closer you can get to a 0% utilization month over month, the better.
Setting Yourself Up For Success
Credit scores can be complex, but they don’t have to be. All it takes is discipline, planning, and budgeting for you to take your credit score from sad to phenomenal.
Check your credit score for free by signing up for Credit Sesame and get the tools and resources you need to succeed financially.