Your Free Credit Report
How to Obtain Your Free Annual Credit Report
You are entitled to a copy of your free annual credit report. You can go to www.annualcreditreport.com to apply online. From there, you will be referred to each of the credit reporting sites to obtain your free report. You are entitled to get one from each of them, per year. The three credit reporting agencies include:
- Equifax
- Experian
- TransUnion
You will have to do an application separately for each of these credit reporting agencies. Be aware that they will try to sell various packages such as credit report monitoring, identity theft protection, and your credit score. Just make sure that you are not selecting any options, if you only want the free credit report. I have had trouble with the online version, as two of the reporting agencies would not verify my account, for some mysterious reason. I have thus far been able to obtain from 1 agency online.
You can request your credit report by phone as well, by calling 1-877-322-8228 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 1-877-322-8228 end_of_the_skype_highlighting. On their site, they say “You will go through a simple verification process over the phone.” However, I found it was impossible to go through the verification process on the phone. The system could not understand digits entered on the phone (for example, the social security number, which is a critical identifying piece of information). I tried calling several times, and from different phones, to no avail.
Interestingly, I got an e-mail invitation the very next day, trying to entice me to join a service that would get me ALL 3 credit reports by joining some service that would then do credit monitoring. So, in my opinion, I suspect the buggy phone and online service may be intentional. Few of us want to resort to snail mail.
The last option is, of course, to submit a request in writing. You can obtain an online request form from the website and send a request for your credit reports to:
Annual Credit Report Request Service
P.O. Box 105281
Atlanta, GA 30348-5281
You should then receive your credit report within 15 days. My request form is still waiting to be filled out, so I don’t know the end result of this method yet!
Aside from the free report you are entitled to each year, you are entitled to a copy of your free credit report if:
- someone has taken adverse action against you because of information in your report
- you are the victim of identity theft and place a fraud alert in your file
- your file contains inaccurate information due to fraud
- you are on public assistance
- you are unemployed but expect to apply for employment within 60 days.
Make sure you take advantage of your right to your free yearly credit report, and make sure that there is no incorrect information in there that can damage your reputation. A once-yearly check should be sufficient to ensure that there is no erroneous information in your report. Should you want to be kept notified of changes, you might elect to get ongoing credit report monitoring.
You should also get a current copy of your current credit report prior to deciding on any debt assistance program. It should give you a run-down of all your accounts that are in default and the amount of the debt, which will be essential information when settling, consolidating, or filing bankruptcy.