If you’ve never checked your credit report, you should. An inaccurate credit report can indicate that your identity has been stolen, and errors in your report can affect your ability to get credit or even affect your insurance rates.
You should never pay to get access to your credit reports. Thanks to a federal law, you can access one credit report from each of the three nationwide credit reporting bureaus (Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax) each year.
To get started, all you have to do is visit annualcreditreport.com and fill out the forms. You can also request your credit report by phone or mail.
Some people decide to request all three credit reports at once. When you do that, it makes it easy to compare the results. But from a security standpoint, I think it’s smarter to request one report from each bureau every four months. (Just remember to always use annualcreditreport.com to access these reports, or you can’t get them for free.) When you request each report every four months over the course of the year, it helps you make sure nothing bad has happened to your credit report all year long. (Credit monitoring without the credit monitoring fees is a good thing!)
Last year, we didn’t check our credit reports because we saw them when we refinanced our mortgage and everything looked okay. But this year, we’ll be doing them every four months starting in January.
One of the things I like about checking my credit report is that it is inspiring to see how much debt you’ve paid off. If you’ve been working hard to get rid of that debt, seeing the numbers on paper can be highly motivating.
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