Wow, have you seed all the sites pushing credit reports? The crazy part is they all want to be the one to give you the FREE credit report and sell you all kinds of stuff in the process.
Ok, by law each of the credit reporting bureaus have to provide you with your credit report for free. They make one report available to you per year. But you have to request it.
Annualcreditreport.com has been set up as the only site the credit reporting bureaus must use. What that means is if you want your free report without wading though endless sales pitches annualcreditreport.com is your URL of choice.
You free credit report does not include your credit score. Yes, you read that correctly. Your credit report is free. With that you can verify the information is correct. You can dispute what you don't agree with or that you simply know is wrong.
If you really want your credit score you must buy it. Each of the bureaus calculate their scores differently so each is different.
The big three bureaus are TransUnion, Equifax and Experian.
In addition to them you may want to get your credit based insurance report from Choicetrust.com.
If you want all the info from all three places including all three scores you can get them at the Experian site. You have to sign up for their program. As of this writing they charge $1.00 for the first 30 days and $14.95 per month after that. You can cancel anytime.
Your score is not important unless you are preparing for a major purchase. You should get the free credit reports though. Go over them carefully. Many of them have errors. The errors may not have a negative effect, but you do want your info to be correct.
You may not have known your credit score affects your ability to get the best insurance rates.
Employers are using places like choicetrust for pre-employment background checks.
Landlord are checking tenants backgrounds now too. There are way to many people mis-representing themselves are something they are not. Landlords and employers are seeking to get the best employees and tenants. One bad one can ruin an otherwise good situation.
If you want to know what a prospective employer will find, you can get a pre-employment self check at choicetrust as well.
In short your credit report means nothing until you need to use credit. You need to know where you stand and you can find out what everyone else will find out. You can do this for free. If you really want your scores you will have to buy them. That is what the credit bureaus sell.
Hope that helps a little.