Brian and I are advocates of checking your credit on a yearly basis to make sure it is free of errors and other anomalies, like fraud or identity theft, things like that. There are many places that offer free credit reports online. The only down side is that they don’t tell you your actual credit score. You often have to pay to get that info. Everything else is free for the most part. However, at the end of the free report (or sometimes at the beginning) they’ll tell you that for $15 or so you can get your actual credit score.

This week we had the opportunity to get our credit info at no cost. As much as we don’t like credit inquiries, we figured that we really want to know how much of a hit our credit took because of the debt consolidation we did a few years ago. We’d rather know the damage now so we can take steps to rectify it before we begin going about getting a loan for new house within the next couple of years. There are many resources on the web that provide helpful information to those wanting to get out of debt or improve their credit. Badcreditoffers.com has a special section on credit repair and relief. Knowing your credit rating is important. If it’s not good, at least you can begin the road to recovery before it gets worse. =P

Brian got the info back from the mortgage broker today. Believe it or not, he actually has better credit than I do. When we first met, he practically had none. LOL. No really. That’s why my name is on our current mortgage. Brian wanted to buy a house. I really didn’t care either way. However, he didn’t have enough credit to get it on his own so I had to get on the mortgage. Looking back, I think it was a trick to get me to marry him. Getting a joint mortgage is a pretty big commitment. How can you not get married after making such a commitment? Of course, I would have accepted his marriage proposal with or without the mortgage hanging over my head.

Almost ten years later, the tables have turned. Brian has better credit than I do. We are both at about 800, but Brian’s is slightly better. Mine is a couple of points below and Brian is about fifteen points above. According to FICO, perfect is 850 so our credit is surprisingly actually pretty good. It seems our debt consolidation didn’t hurt us at all. I was afraid that the debt consolidation would tarnish our credit so much that we would have to settle for bad credit loans. I think the good thing about Brian and I is that we took action before we missed or were late on any payments. Besides that, we really did learn our lesson and we haven’t reverted back to our old crazy spending ways. I think that is what has helped our credit stay good inspite of everything.

When we were looking at our report today, which we didn’t have to pay for thanks to the mom’s mortgage broker friend (it was actually a small investment on his part because he is hoping to get our business when we buy a new house some time next year), Brian joked “Gosh! I never would have married you had I known you had a below 800 credit score!” Kidding aside, I think I was already at about 800 when we met. If anything, my score just got worse because when we first got together we spent more than we were making. I’m really proud of the kind of people we’ve become. We’ve learned the value of saving, and we just save, save, save as much as we possibly can. Delayed gratification is a good thing specially if your goal is to retire at 55, which according to the mortgage broker is not so farfetched based on our current spending/saving habits. Only 25 more years to go!