808
Eight-oh-eight.
My eyes bugged wide open as I came face-to-face with my credit score. I exclaimed my joy!
I felt a profound sense of satisfaction as I read the following commentary on my credit report:
"Your score is excellent, and a wide array of loans and credit cards will likely be available to you, often at attractive rates. It is unlikely that your credit application would be denied based on this score alone. The fact that you have received such a high score implies that you scored the maximum (or very near the maximum) possible points for many of the aspects that are evaluated by the FICO score. As such, you should not consider the factors discussed later in this analysis to be any serious flaws with your credit history. They simply indicate the few factors on which you did not score the absolute maximum possible points. You should already have a wide array of credit products available to you."
I felt even more confident about my ability to get my own home - the home I have been saving like a madwoman for - the home I was driving around a certain neighborhood taking pictures for just this past weekend. It felt good to see a pie chart with 99% non-revolving installment debt reported (meaning my credit card debt is gone, and all that’s left are student loans and my car note). It felt good to look over the payment history of all of my accounts and see no gaps, no late payments, no delinquencies, no charge offs…
But for the grace of God - the blessings of employment, unemployment insurance, the ability to save, the discipline to watch my spending, solid common-sense hustle, and no devastating emergencies - I wouldn’t be looking eight-oh-eight in the face.
If you want to check your credit report for free, as I’ve been doing for the past few years now (it’s taken me this long to work the factors and pull my score out of the 600s), go to AnnualCreditReport.com. If you’d like to view your FICO score as well, it is also available there for a separate fee. Instead of checking all three companies’ reports, I have only checked one for now, and I’ll come back to check the others at intervals between now and when I start mortgage shopping. This is important because they each report differently and you should know what people will see when they check your report - details, errors, and omissions can be different on each report and it’s our job to stay on top of it.
