9 months to polish your credit

Colleen Ryan, a spokeswoman for TransUnion, says the services offered as part of the settlement will last only the specified time. "We will not shift consumers to paid services thereafter."

Another issue to bear in mind: TransUnion is only one of the three keepers of sacred credit data. Getting access to one company's report and its version of your score isn't the whole picture.

Each bureau uses its data to calculate a proprietary credit score, but none of those scores is the one you know best, the FICO. FICO scores are created using data from all three bureaus and a formula provided by Fair Isaac.

"If you're going to pay for a credit score, you should buy a FICO, since that's the one most lenders use," says credit expert and MSN Money columnist Liz Pulliam Weston. "But even the proprietary scores provided by the bureaus will give you some idea where your credit stands relative to others and how lenders might view you."

Yet this settlement -- possibly the biggest ever in terms of the number of people it may affect -- offers a unique opportunity to those of us who want to improve our credit scores. And who doesn't?

"You're not getting a FICO score, but this could be educational at least," consumer advocate Mierzwinski says.

An experiment in credit

With unlimited access to your TransUnion credit report and its version of your credit score, as well as e-mail alerts when your report changes, you will get feedback on how your financial behavior affects your credit profile. For example:

• Give in at Banana Republic and sign up for the store card to get the 15% discount (as I almost did recently). What happens to your score?

• Pay off that pesky medical bill or knock down your car loan? Which is better for your score?

• Take out a line of credit on your house to pay for new windows (which my husband and I were tempted to do). What happens to your score?

As I said, you cannot get your total credit picture this way, but you will get a reflection of how your financial decisions are likely to ding your credit profile or give it a nice boost.

It's like being a little white lab mouse, getting instant reinforcements that will shape your behavior for nine months. Push bar A and you get a treat. Push bar B and you get a shock.

Naughty mousy! No more shopping at Banana!

On your mark, get set . . .

To make this more fun and interesting, in the true spirit of the Women in Red, we decided to make this a race. It will start in September (yes, you can take summer off) and last until next June.

Here's how it will work:

• Sign up for the nine-month option offered by the settlement. Again, you can join here. It takes only a minute, and you can apply using just your name, address, e-mail, phone number, birth date and last four digits of your Social Security number. It does not require a credit card.

• Go to the Women in Red message board and join the discussion forum there about how to improve your credit. This is where credit racers will report changes to their scores and swap experiences and advice. The credit racers' discussion thread will begin now, just to get people organized and motivated.

• In the meantime, serious credit racers might want to brush up on their credit cleanup skills by reading some of MSN Money's excellent articles on credit or Weston's terrific book on the subject. You can also ask any kind of credit or debt question of the National Foundation for Credit Counseling experts who staff our Ask a Credit Counselor message board every day.

• Technically, this isn't a race to beat other people but a race to achieve your own best performance. Next summer, however, we will acknowledge the top 10 racers -- those whose credit scores showed the biggest gains -- with 50 years of credit monitoring and scores from Experian (which generously used the opportunity to tweak one of its rivals).

See you at the starting line!

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