May 15, 2015

It's May, Have You Pulled Your Credit Report?


Back in January I wrote about Three Easy Ways to Protect Your Identity and Your Finances. In that post I talked about pulling your credit report.

If you pulled all 3 in January you'll have to wait until next January to pull another one, if you pulled only one, it's time to pull a report from another credit bureau.
If you see that post or didn't pull a report at all, here's a quick recap and you can read the full post here.
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An easy way to monitor your own credit (i.e. you don't have to pay someone to do that for you), is to pull a copy of your credit report every 4 months.
Federal law mandates that each of the credit bureaus provide you with one free credit report per year. There are three credit bureaus, so that means you can pull from one of them every four months. (If it's your first time pulling a credit report, experts recommend pulling all 3 at once, then in a year start rotating through each bureau.)
EquifaxExperianTransUnion

To do this go to annualcreditreport.com and click on the "request your free credit reports" button.
 
Annual Credit Report.com The only source for your free credit reports. Authorized by Federal law
 ***DO NOT go anywhere else, you will probably end up getting charged for a credit monitoring service, your credit score, or something else.


Checking your credit report regularly allows you to watch for unauthorized accounts (Fraud, ID Theft), ensure that accounts which you've closed are actually closed, and see that your payments are being recorded correctly.
Even if you have no debt, and no intentions of borrowing money you should still be checking your credit report.

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