Consumer Car Buying Advice Blog

You can improve your chances of getting approved for a bad credit auto loan by first getting a free credit score

Your credit score

If you have bad credit you may be thinking apply for a bad credit car loan before seeing your credit report.

During the past twenty years, we’ve seen this many times here at Auto Credit Express, where our commitment to consumers with bad credit extends to our web site. It contains a bad credit car loan application – something we felt was needed after seeing the looks of concern and frustration that customers with poor credit often have when they visit a dealer that doesn’t offer second chance auto loans.

And while these folks can always visit a tote the note dealer, this won’t improve their car credit since these dealers don’t report loans or loan payments to the credit bureaus and the loans, themselves, often end up in repossession.

Your free credit score

Speaking of credit bureaus, if you’ve been paying attention, you’ve probably seen the commercials offering you a free credit score. But do you really need this kind of service and is it really free?

Although most of these ads are simply a way to convince you to pay for additional services, there is one site that will let you view and print your credit reports from the three major credit bureaus without costing you a cent.

Credit reports

While there’s no such thing as a free lunch, there actually is a way that you can get a credit report from each of the credit bureaus at no charge.

When Congress passed the Fair Credit Reporting Act in 1970 it ensured that consumers would have access to the information in their credit files. The law was amended in 1996, and in 2003 a new law (the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act or FACTA) changed the original act to require credit bureaus to furnish consumers with one credit report per year per company at no charge, as well as access to their FICO scores for a reasonable fee (not free but at least available).

You can do it three ways: You can write to each bureau, you can call the toll-free numbers of the 3 credit bureaus, or you can go to this website: www.annualcreditreport.com.

At the web site, you’ll need to furnish information that establishes your identity and, once validated, you can view and download a report immediately.

More services

A number of companies, such as freescore360.com, will, for a fee, furnish you with a credit report and credit score from each bureau. Credit monitoring services are also available that can help you guard against identity theft.

Our service

At Auto Credit Express we specialize in placing customers with bad credit with dealers that can help them. These dealers are knowledgeable and work with a broad spectrum of lenders to ensure you get your best chance at an approval for a bad credit auto loan.

So if you are serious about getting your car credit back on track, you can begin by filling out our bad credit auto loan application now.

Tags: credit report, credit score, fico, FICO score, free credit score

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