My Credit Manager provides you with access to your credit score and reporting, so you’ll know where your credit stands. You can easily see your score, changes to your score and run “what-if” scenarios to see the potential impact when making financial decisions. Plus, you can discover tools and resources for managing your score to stay in good standing.
You can easily find My Credit Manager within the Peoples State Bank digital banking platforms and mobile access near the bottom of your main dashboard.
Who can benefit from My Credit Manager?
Every Peoples State Bank customer can benefit! It’s free and available 24/7 to all digital banking customers.
Why is credit score monitoring important?
Checking your credit history and credit scores can help you better understand your current credit position. Regularly checking your credit reports can help you be more aware of what lenders may see. Checking your credit reports can also help you detect any inaccurate or incomplete information.
How do I dispute and correct inaccurate information on my credit report?
If you discover information on your credit report that you believe is inaccurate, you can take the following steps to dispute and hopefully correct the information.
- Highlight the errors on your credit report
- Gather supporting documents that show your side of the story; for example, receipts or bank records showing that you made a payment on time that’s recorded as late or delinquent.
- Submit the information to the bureaus with a brief explanation (100 words or less).
In addition to calculating credit scores themselves, the three major credit bureaus, Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion, provide detailed information about a consumer’s credit activity to other companies that calculate a credit score.
VantageScore
VantageScore 3.0 considers the following when calculating your score (source):
Payment history (41%)
Repayment behavior, such whether you pay on time or have delinquencies.
Age of credit (20%)
How long you’ve been using credit.
Utilization (20%)
The ratio between available credit and used credit.
New credit (11%)
The number or recent accounts opened plus credit inquiries (hard inquiries).
Balance (6%)
Total amount of reported debt.
Available credit (2%)
Amount of credit available.
VantageScore categories
300 – 600: Subprime
601 – 660: Near prime
651 – 780: Prime
781 – 850: Superprime
You can take several steps to improve your credit score, but be aware that there are no quick fixes. You may be able to see your score tick up soon after you start trying to improve it. However, credit reports are updated month by month and it may take several months or even years before your credit score is where you want it to be.
- Pay your bills on time. Late and delinquent payments make up much of what determines your credit score. You need to establish a good record of timely payments. Consider setting up autopay for your accounts.
- Reduce your credit utilization. Credit utilization is another important factor in calculating your credit score. Keeping low balances on revolving accounts, such as credit cards, will help improve your score. You can also reduce credit utilization by requesting an increasein your credit line—as long as you don’t use the increase in your limit to increase debt.
- Avoid or limit opening new accounts, especially multiple accounts within a short period. When you apply for credit, the prospective lender makes a hard credit inquiry, which is reported to the bureaus. Lenders may interpret making multiple credit applications as you facing financial troubles and looking to increase debt as a way out.
- If you have no credit history, or a thin credit history, you can look into other ways to get yourself on record as making timely payments. One solution is a credit builder loan, where you make payments into an account over a set period of time (usually one or two years). These payments are reported to the bureaus, so you build a credit history. If you pay monthly rent and utilities, you can look into rent reporting options. With rent reporting, your landlord or property management company reports your monthly rent and utilities to the bureaus.
- Keep older accounts open. Length of credit history works for you. The longer you have an account open, the more stable you look to the bureaus.
- Consolidate your debts. Too many accounts may work against you. If possible reduce the number of accounts, but be careful of affecting credit utilization. Don’t max out an account by consolidating it.
- Use credit monitoring. Improving your credit score is a project, a credit monitoring app is a critical tool for helping you manage your credit profile.
Why is your score different than others I see, such as Credit Karma?
Each of the three credit bureaus (Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion) uses a different model to calculate a credit score and each gathers data independently.
The credit bureaus pull your information from many different sources (such as lenders, collections, court records) at different times, there will often be discrepancies at any particular time between the reports from each credit bureau. The financial institutions and companies that provide your credit score use different methods. Some rely on FICO® Score and some rely on VantageScore. Even between those two companies, there are credit scores based on reports from one bureau, two bureaus, or all three bureaus.
Why do the reported dates differ between accounts? Does that mean my score isn’t up to date?
Lenders generally update their data on a monthly basis. However, the lenders may report data at various times during the month. The differences in reporting dates shouldn’t vary by more than 30 days. If you’re waiting for a specific update, such as corrected information from a dispute, remember that it can take up to 45 days for the updated information to appear on your credit report.
How secure is my credit data? Does anyone else, such as portal admins, have access to any of my information?
Your credit data is fully encrypted and secure. No one else has access to your information.
How frequently is my overall credit score updated?
Your credit score is updated completely every 30 to 45 days.
How are the simulated scores calculated?
Credit Score Simulator uses calculations that are similar to Experian, which uses the VantageScore model.
How accurate are these simulations?
Credit Score Simulator is an educational tool that you can use for estimating the effect of certain financial actions on your credit score—but remember, they’re estimations only, not predictions. Actual results may be different.