What one to use? I thought I heard recently that one was “better” than another or that one was more of a scam.
I’ve ordered online credit reports a few times now,
What you want is a credit report gives your score from the three US credit Bureaus (assuming you live in the US)
Equifax
TransUnion
Experian
These scores are the “meat” of a credit report. Shop around a little bit, find the cheapest report that will give you these scores. Other things (credit advice, credit tracking, etc.) are all secondary and you can judge their value as you want.
Just get these three scores and you have a very good idea of your credit rating.
Past these three scores, the next most valuable item to get from a credit report is a listing of your current credit lines. The first time I received a credit report I learned that 2 of the 3 credit bureaus thought I still held credit lines on cards that I no longer possessed. This made it easy to send letters to them saying that these particular cards were closed and that they should remove them from my credit profile - which they did.
http://www.annualcreditreport.com/ is the only truly free one. freecreditreport.com is owned by one of the bureaus and is designed to sell products.
Sweet. Thanks guys.
By the way, each bureau only lets you use their service once per year. However, you can decide to only get a report for one; you can hit one every four months and repeat.
The ‘annual credit report’ website does not give you your credit score, which is not really all that important until you start trying to buy something. It is more of a service designed to let you monitor your report for any inconsistencies.
Yes, but the only way to get your actual score is either to pay for it or finance something. Then I think the merchant has to provide your score upon request, I’m not sure if that is federal law or state.
I understand. But that wasn’t what the OP asked. I was just clarifying your post for the benefit of LOUNE
I’m fairly sure we didn’t get a copy of our credit score when we financed our car.
However, that dealer was totally shady and swindled us, so who knows.
Me personally, I get the three free reports once a year from annualcreditreport.com and look them over for errors. I know roughly where our debt to income ratio puts us, so that’s score enough.
The whole guilty until proven innocent aspect of modern credit reporting chaffs me so hard. 
Well, technically, it’s for my girlfriend, the Prius addict who is slowly weaning off her drug of choice.