We all know that a credit card issuer will look at your credit score, usually referred as the FICO score, before issuing you a credit card. Actually, business lenders use a similar approach or credit scoring system to determine your business credit performance and decide whether or not to give you credit.

You aleady know that when you submit an application for a credit card, the credit card issuer will check your credit score and then decide whether or not to approve yout application. If you have a really low credit score, you will be declined. If you have a solid credit, then you probably will get approved. You might also know that if you have good credit score, your mortgage rate will be lower than those without good credit. It seems bad credit can also get something for you but with higher costs. But, actually, there’re many ways that a bad credit can hurt you.

One of the most scariest types of identity theft is new account fraud. It happens when an identity thief steal your personal information, open a series of new credit card accounts, loans or other account under your name. According to a new Federal Trade Commission (FTC) study, 8.3 million U.S. adults become victims of ID theft each year.

Yesterday TransUnion announced that it will soon provide eligible U.S. consumers up to 9 months of free credit monitoring and related services. This result is part of a settlement of a lawsuit that has been pending for a decade and arose from a product has been terminated in 2001 by TransUnion. See this article for more details.

Today I received an email from one of my readers asking about the free credit report stuff. He seems to order a “free” credit report from FreeCreditReport.Com after he watched the ad in the TV. Then he realized that he was billed $14.95 per month. Yes, it’s not free! If you google with “freecreditreport.com”, you can see a lot of ripoff reports about freecreditreport.com. Be careful then!

It’s interesting to see that Warren Buffett has a FICO credit score of 712 according to the Fortune Magazine. (2008, March 31, The Oracle’s Credit Crisis) Well, how can that be? We all know that Warren Buffett is one of the wealthiest men on the planet?

I have many individual posts about how to get your free credit score and credit report. You can get a free copy of your credit report every year from www.annualcreditreport.com which is a government supported website. However, this website doesn’t provide credit score. Then how can you get your credit score for free? Let me tell you……

You’ve probably seen a lot of “free credit score” or “free credit report” advertisements all around the internet. Actually, they will charge you a certain amount of monthly fees if you don’t cancel the service before trial period. If you search on the web, you can see tons of reports of complaints about credit service providers.

I got this information from the front page of this week’s staples flyer. Right now, if you sign up privacy guard service at www.privacyguard.com/staples20, you can get a $20 staples gift card plus a free 1-month Privacy Guard identity Theft Protection.

I believe most of us are familiar with this funny commercial from freecreditreport.com. However, I have to tell you that this commercial for “FreeCreditReport.com” is not only somewhat inaccurate but it’s misleading.