Understanding Credit Checking


We look at the two things you need to understand about your personal finance file to help you find the best and most affordable options currently available.


Credit checking is simply when a bank of other organisation looks at your personal finance file to help them make the decision as to whether they wish to do business with you or not.

There are many types of organisation that can look at your file, though for most of us this type of checking occurs when we are looking to:

  1. borrow some money
  2. get a mobile phone contract
  3. get a utility bill contract, such as gas or electricity

In this article we are going to specifically look at what you need to know when looking to find the most affordable financial options currently available to you.


Step 1

Understand there are three versions!!

What many people do not realise, is that there is experian logoactually three version of their finance file, one for each of the major referencing agencies:

  1. Equifax
  2. Experian
  3. Trans Union

Equifax LogoEach agency holds slightly different information about you, and when doing their pre -agreement checking, one bank may for example look at Equifax, whilst another lender may look at Call Credit, and maybe your mobile phone company may look at Experian.

So the first to understanding checking is to realise that different lenders will use different credit referencing agencies to check your file.

So all this means, is that you need to get a ‘cross agency’ combined version of your file. ‘Your report explained’ which can be viewed below:


Step 2

Purchase a Multi-Agency Combined Version of Your File

Purchase I hear you say, can’t you get free reports?

Yes you can, but like everything in life you get what you pay for.

A Sample Credit RecordWhat is most useful is to be able to look in details at your credit file, and see ALL the information that is contained on the report.

Firstly so you know exactly the information they hold about you, and secondly if anything is wrong, you can get this corrected.

The reports are fairly easy to read, you can see an example on here.

The free reports do give you some information, such as your credit score, but most people really do not understand what their current score really means, and therefore the free reports have limited use.

We suggest getting a one off combined credit report from www.checkmyfile.com (free for 30 days, then for just £14.99 a month after, which you can cancel online at any time). This will give you ALL the information you need regarding your file.

Even if you know you have lots of missed payments and your personal finance file looks bad, it is still very useful to see in ‘black and white’ what your file look like, for this can be your very first step to then improving it.


How Will This Help?

So now you’ve looked through your file (not that you can do anything about what is actually on it) you can now only start applying for some of the current options available from UK lenders.

  • Lots of failed application to lenders do not look good on a file plus it wastes your time.
  • So use the information you now know about your own file to only approach lenders who are likely to accept you.

How do I find out my current rating?

To find out your current credit rating, the best option is to get ALL the information ALL the referencing agencies hold on you with a multi-agency report.

You can do this through Check My File (free for 30 days, then for just £14.99 a month after, which you can cancel online at any time). Click here to visit their site.

Checkmyfile
See more than twice the information compared to any other Credit Report in the UK

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