How to check your Credit Score free in Canada

A credit score can make a difference whether you can borrow money or not, it doesn’t matter how long you’re living in the same place or old is your credit file or working at very good job position. If your credit score is not better than in most cases lenders will deny to lend you money. Moreover, in a recent study by the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada, most Canadians answered about credit score that it is a loan or bill payment history.

Credit score is basically a three digit number which tells lender about you that how financially stable you are. The higher the credit score means that there are more chances that lenders will lend you and opposite in the case of lower score. There are many things due to which your score varies like timely payments, usage, etc. but I’ll share about that in detailed later on.

In Canada there are two credit reporting agencies Equifax and TransUnion from where you can get your credit report and credit score. It is recommended to check your credit report from both agencies as both may have different data on your file and if something is wrong get it corrected.

In Canada most people don’t bother to check their credit score or are not aware that they can also check their score or report instantly.

Most of the Canadian Financial Institutes check credit report from the Equifax but you can request a free credit report from both agencies by mail. For Equifax, please fill this form and for TransUnion you can fill online form to access the report.

One thing here I would like to mention that checking your credit score yourself doesn’t affect your score as it makes a soft hit on your file not the hard check. Soft checks are only seen by you not the lenders, they only see hard checks on your file.

Another reason for checking your credit score is that if you’re applying for a new credit card or thinking to get a mortgage so that you can show your latest credit report to the lender instead of the lender makes a hard check on your file.

Equifax:

Equifax provides one month free trial in which you will get an instant credit report with credit score. You just need to sign up and provide a few details about you and need to answer a few questions to confirm pull correct credit file. They also provide the details like which things could be impacting your score with Identity theft insurance up to $25,000.

In this one month trail you can cancel your account and you’ll not be charged further. Below is sample of Equifax Credit Report and Score.

Borrowell:

Borrowell is Toronto, Canada based lender who recently partnered with Equifax to provide a free credit score to Canadian residents. You don’t need to borrow anything from them and can access your credit score instantly and they will also provide your updated score 4 times a year(after every 3 months).

Update: I received the email from Borrowell that they have improved the process they used to verify the identity, so now the customers who were not able to check the credit score before can see their score now. I was able to check my score without any issue, do check yours.

I tried myself on Borrowell to check my credit score, but even answering all questions correctly, they denied with the reason that I’ve placed an alert on my Equifax account or I answered questions incorrectly though I’d answered everything correct and when I checked my Equifax account there was soft check on my Credit file by Borrowell. Anyway, checking your credit score via Borrowell will make soft check on your credit file so lenders will not see it.

Mint(Doesn’t offer Credit Score Anymore in Canada):

Mint.com is managed by popular software company Intuit who also own tax filing software TurboTax and Quickbooks. Mint is actually budget/financial management service. They also have Blackberry, Android and iOS apps to track your finance. They also provide your credit score from Equifax but I don’t recommend you Mint.com as you’ve to enter your bank or financial details to know your score, even they claim that they use same bank level security.

Mogo

Mogo is also another Canadian lender who provides free Credit Score except Quebec when you sign up with them. They also show your score provided by Equifax.

Moreover, if you’re not much concerned about your credit score and If you do banking with CIBC, not sure about other banks, they also provides updates if anything changes on your Credit file so that you can take action if something appears abnormal.

Please comment below which method you used to check your score and how it worked for you.