Using a credit check to decide on loan eligibility is considered the fairest way to evaluate borrowers. Lenders check your credit reports as a method of determining whether you are a good risk for loans, based on your payment history, average account balance, credit card balances, and whether you’re still paying off college, an automobile loan, or have outstanding loans and payments unique to homeowners such as mortgages.

But your credit rating can also influence decisions such as your auto insurance or life insurance rates. Even though most insurance carriers don’t like to advertise this fact, and your credit report may or may not have any serious bearing on your rate, it is still often considered as a factor in many situations you might not expect, such as whether you can get certain kinds of jobs or qualify to rent a certain apartment.

Many, if not most, situations in which your credit score may be used as a criterion for or against you are subject to disclosure, and some states, such as California, do not allow credit checks to impact consideration for most jobs.

When it comes to getting a loan for medical expenses, the information a credit reporting agency has on you may affect your perceived ability to pay in ways you didn’t expect, but a credit check is necessary to help you get the best possible loan and interest rate for your needs and overall financial situation.

There’s no risk to credit score to find out if you prequalify with United Medical Credit, so if you’re looking for financing, we encourage you to apply and find out your monthly payment options.

There are several useful online financial tools for monitoring credit score, including Credit Karma’s free credit monitoring, FreeCreditReport.com, Quicken, or other services. These can be helpful both to give you a “big picture” overview of your credit score and to help you identify negative information in the contents of your credit report which may have a disproportionate impact on your credit rating.

In addition, they give you and your financial advisor a basis for comparison to figure out what you’ve got to do to your credit score and confirm or contest the validity of information in your file, so you can tell the credit bureaus your score is in error and needs to be revisited.

Credit checking tools have become more powerful and prevalent than ever before, as more people become aware of the fact that their credit scores can have on their lives.

United Medical Credit take a great deal of pride in the security and privacy of our systems. Our simple, easy-to-use dashboard and 128-bit encryption follow the most stringent HIPAA requirements, preserving the integrity and privacy of your information well beyond industry standards.

Anyone in our lender network may review your application for review purposes, but if they don’t offer you a loan or you don’t accept, they will not keep your information on file, adding an extra layer of protection.

Many people look to credit scores as the end-all/be-all of financial health and believe once something is on your credit, it is there forever. This is not always the case. Even bankruptcy, which has one of the longest shelf lives of any kind of debt, drops off after seven years.

However, this is not always true in practice. Faulty computer programming, erroneous coding, and other technical issues can lead to “phantom debt” or “zombie debt” showing up on your credit report years after the issue should have been resolved.

If you find information on your credit report that is no longer accurate, each of the major credit reporting bureaus and all major banks have procedures you can follow to report errors, omissions, or factual problems with your credit statement. In some cases, your credit report will have a table of contents that tells you exactly where to find this information, so you can get to it quickly.