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The word is out! It's getting harder to get consumer credit! It doesn't matter who you are - blue collar, middle class or wealthy - unless your credit score is good, you'll be offered less to borrow or refused credit altogether.

If the world is going to get harder, you need credit management. The first step is to make a free credit check. Reading through your credit history gives you the chance to correct any mistakes.

Then there are all the problems of identity fraud. If you monitor your transactions, you can pick up unauthorized sales before they become a problem. Making a credit check is absolutely free.

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	This is not the time to sit back
	Should you pay for credit check services?
	How can you improve your credit score?

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Should you pay for credit check services?

Like every financial decision you have to make, the decision on whether to pay for credit check services all comes down to value for money. If you're self-confident and can get things done, all you need are the free credit reports from the credit bureaus: Equifax, TransUnion and Experian. Thanks to the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act of 2003 (FACTA), you get one free credit report per year from each company. The best strategy is to get one report every four months. This gives you a regular snapshot of your creditworthiness. If you find any mistakes or suspicious transactions, you can take action. But if you're not so confident of being able to deal with these big companies, there are credit monitoring and repair services to do it for you. So it can be worth paying a company to protect your interests if it keeps lines of credit open.

Should you pay to see your credit score? FACTA only gives you free access to the report not to the score based on it. The reason for this is there is no single "correct" or "accurate" score. Every company has its own formulas for calculating the score for their own purposes. So if you ask a bank for an overdraft, its calculation is very different from a company deciding whether to give you a mortgage to buy your home. In essence, though, everyone is looking at two variables in your credit file: whether you have paid your other debts on time and your debt-to-income ratio, i.e. the percentage of your monthly paycheck needed to cover your fixed outgoings. There are differences in the weightings for each risk assessment but you will get general guidance if you pay for a score. If you find your score is low, the credit services can advise you on how to improve.

Summing up, if you have a number of different accounts and find it difficult to keep on top of everything happening, it can be worth a few dollars a month to have someone score watch and monitor the transactions for anything suspicious (particularly if you travel abroad). One of the difficulties is that not everyone passes up-to-date information to all three credit bureau, so your personal information may be correct in one but not the others. But if your financial life is very simple and you cope well when having to deal with larger companies, you can make do with just the free credit reports.