Credit Reporting Websites - Choosing a Reliable Provider
If you are currently looking for a website to provide you with credit reporting or monitoring services, our advice would be that you do so with great care and caution. Whilst the majority of websites out there offering credit score services are highly reliable - there are always the odd few which do nothing to add to the reputation of the industry on the whole.
How Identity Theft Can Affect Your Credit Score
We've all heard of the impending threat of identity theft, especially in today's modern electronic world. Whenever we hear the term, we automatically think of people sitting in a dark room, in a far away country - counting the pennies from people who they have successfully scammed.
Credit Scorecards - What Are They and Who Uses Them?
Don't mistake a credit score for a credit scorecard - they are not the same thing. In this article, we will take a look at the difference between these two things - both of which are reports - but both of which serve a different purpose.
Credit Score Prediction Services - It's Harder Than It Sounds
As you sit at home, working out your finances and paying off bills as you receive them in the mail - you probably have a fairly good idea of where you want your credit score to be in the future.
Whether you want to increase your credit score, or keep it relatively the same - the interesting thing about our guesses is that they are often correct. We know where our credit score is going, and more importantly, educated people know how to get it there over time.
So what about all of these credit score predication services available to lenders and financial institutions today? Are they able to efficiently and effectively summarize the future movements of your credit score - or are they often off the mark and not worth the hassle? We set out to find out.
No One Can Predict Better Than You
After a huge amount of research - we have officially decided that no one is able to predict your credit score movements than you. Why? Because currently credit score modelling techniques (for future prediction) significantly lack ability in one area: predicting you.
Ultimately, any system which is going to accurately predict a credit score movement in the future needs to predict your actions. After all, it is what you do which makes the difference to your credit score - both positive and negative.
If you've ever tried predicting someone's actions before - you might understand just how challenging it can be. For example:
- Impossible to predict future defaults or defaults from identity theft.
- No way to predict your state of mind or personal financial style.
Really, the only way to reach a conclusion about the future movements of a credit score is to rely on past information - which is surprisingly a very unreliable estimate of upcoming actions.
Don't Bother With Retail Credit Score Prediction
If there's one thing we've learnt about credit score prediction services available to consumers - it's this:
- "We don't need to use them!"
Seriously - stop spending money trying to predict your own actions (which only you can do anyway) and put that money to better use by employing a credit score monitoring service or something of the like. This will provide far greater benefit and protection for the future.