Personal Musings

This blog is intended to be just a jumble of thoughts that hit me and need not necessarily mean anything.

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Location: Kerala, India

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Thursday, March 30, 2017

Emergency Credit Score rating

All of you would have faced a panic situation when you want to know that you are not declared a Vijay Mallya(Sorry Mallyaji, you have become a synonym for NPA for commoners like us!). Maybe forgot to pay some loan for far too long. Maybe delayed paying credit card for some time. Maybe forgot that mail and kept postponing to next week as there was some other emergency payment to take care of. This article from their excellent DYK(Did You Know ) is another good introductory article regarding credit scores. Basically, good credit score means you can easily get those 30-second-loans at attractive interest rates. Bad credit score means that you will be kicked like a football before you get a loan approved, or alternatively, the lenders might charge you in-exorbitant rates.

This post is just a quick run through of how I and my friend saw our credit score using CIBIL. I am using CIBIL because this seemed to be the fastest way to get it as per an article in livemint. (Note of caution for using CIBIL: their T&C. I also got stupid ad mails in my inbox.)

Before we start, it's our right to have one free credit score report every financial year. it's free, so better get it before the financial year runs out by March 31st.

Register
First, go to:
www.cibil.com/freecreditscore

You will be asked your Name, DOB, PAN Card, etc.

And they have that irritating captcha to fill.

In my case, I immediately got an SMS with my CIBIL TransUnion score. (My mom raised me good :-) )  I already have an e-KYC. I have already given away a lot of personal details when i had created my trading account.

In the case of my friend, he was asked to enter his credit card details, his other loan details. The details asked were name of bank, credit card number, maximum loan amount approved for you so far in the recent past, total loan approved in the last one year. He had to take another fifteen minutes to hunt the details from his accounts and furnish details. After that, he got the SMS without any score.

Login - first time
We will get a mail with one time password from CIBIL. 
You have to login with your email address, this onetime password and a captcha to myCIBIL.
https://www.cibil.com/mycibil/

There is a reason why I am saying this. The moment you login, you will be taken to a password reset page where you will be asked to enter new password. After you submit, the CIBIL folks botch up a bit. You have to get back to the login page again, and login with your new password.


Finding the Report
Getting your score is straight forward. You can see your score. However, finding the report needs a bit of fiddling about. In your home page or dashboard as they would like to call it, look for View Report. This is the second tab, right next to Dashboard.

Now ask me, what's so tough if there is already a tab marked View Report. Well, you wont find a report when you click on the tab. What you have to do is look for a tab within this titled, Account Information.

In it, you will find a detailed report based on each credit source.
Credit card, name of bank, various dates(including date this information is certified).
Loan type, name of bank, loan account number, kind of loan,value, etc.

These people will only report data for last 36 months.

For credit card, they give 000 or XXX is all is well. Or else, they will mark the delay in payment.

In loans, they were putting some codes.

STD --standard: means Payments are made within 90 days.
If you dont repay within 90 days, they consider it as a Non Performaing Asset(NPA)
SMA --special mention account: things are going bad for this account
SUB--substandard: already the account has been made NPA for a year.
DBT--doubtful: its already 2 years since loan wasnt paid. marked substandard for a year
LSS-loss..... hope is gone that money will come back.

Another point to note: all adverse markings shall be noted in this report.

When suddenly you see a bad score, it really hurts. It feels like the way we have failed a paper for the first time.