Get Free Credit Reports
Under federal law, you are entitled to get free credit reports from each of the three major credit reporting companies every 12 months. Not surprisingly, there are any number of Websites out there trying to take advantage of this fact to lure you in and either charge you a fee or scam you. One site, however, is legitimate.
That site is annualcreditreport.com. The federal Fair Credit Reporting Act requires that all three major credit reporting agencies — Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion — provide you with a free credit report every 12 months, and they’ve set up annualcreditreport.com to provide you with a relatively painless way to do this.
These credit reporting agencies aren’t flawless, so it’s a good idea to get a report from each every year, just to make sure they aren’t screwing with your ability to get credit by reporting something fraudulent. I recently got mine and discovered that there was a credit card on there that I had never seen before. Luckily, the person was making their payments, but still, it didn’t belong on my report. The three agencies are easy to get in touch with (TransUnion requires a bit more documentation before they’ll consider a request to alter your report), and the problem has since been fixed, but had I not gotten the reports, I would have never known about the problem.
It’s better to fix problems with your credit before you need your credit, I say.
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This entry was posted by admin on Friday, February 20th, 2009 at 8:09 am and is filed under Money. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I never know that we can get free credit report, all I thought we have to pay every time. Thanks very useful info here…