ATLANTA -- Getting your credit score for free is not easy. The three credit reporting bureaus will tell you your score, but they also want to sell you monitoring services that can cost more than $100 a year. Now Consumer Advisor Clark Howard has found a way for you to get your score – no strings attached.

If you want to buy a house, get a new car or apply for a credit card at Home Depot, there’s one thing these places will want to know: Your credit score.

For years, we couldn’t find out our own score, now we can but usually we have to sign up for a monitoring service just to get it and that can cost between $10 and $15 a month.

“I think it’s ridiculous you’d have to pay to check your own credit report,” said consumer Nalley Totus. “It should be free.”

Experian, which also owns FreeCreditReport.com, says it’ll give you your score for free – but watch out. Experian automatically signs you up for monitoring for $15 a month and you only have seven days to cancel.

Other bureaus are more up front about costs, but none of them will tell you what Clark is about to – you don’t have to pay a dime for your credit score.

“You don’t even have to sign up for monitoring service and you don’t have to do any kind of “free trail” that the credit bureaus hope you forget about,” said Clark.

Clark gives you three places you can go. First up – Quizzle.com owned by Quicken. Two other sites to try are Credit.com and CreditKarma.com.

Why should you care about your credit score? Even if you don’t need to make a big purchase, tracking your score will clue you in to any problems on your credit report. “That way if there’s a mistake, you can get it fixed,” said Clark.