When interest rates are low, savvy homeowners understand how smart it can be to tap into their existing equity in their home to pay for purchases. If either of you own a home and aren’t currently saddled with a lot of consumer debt, a home equity loan may be an option for you to consider to pay for your wedding.

Before you can consider borrowing money to pay for your wedding, you need to know how financial institutions see you. That is, do you have impeccable credit (you pay all of your bills on time, for starters) so you’re the kind of customer that banks want to do business with? Or is your credit on the shaky side (you’ve fallen behind in paying back loans, for example) so banks might see you as a credit risk? The only
way to get a sense of how credit-worthy you are is to get a copy of your credit report.

There are threemajor companies that issue credit reports, and these credit reports are what banks, credit card companies, and other financial institutions refer to when considering a loan application from someone. Devote one weekend day to requesting each of your credit reports at each of these company’s websites:

Experian.com, Equifax.com, Transunion.com

You’ll have to pay a nominal fee for each credit report request. Then you can expect a hard copy of your report in the mail a few days later.
Keep in mind that the reason that you want to get credit reports from each of these companies is this: You want to ensure that your credit is squeaky clean at each of these three companies because you can never be sure which one a financial institution might call when checking on your credit. Also, credit bureaus have different ways of collecting credit information and different criteria for grading your credit so you should be on the safe side and see all of your credit reports. Yes, I know this seems a bit absurd that you can’t even control your own credit but that’s just the way it is.