Free Credit Monitoring
Making sure your credit report is correct can save you years of high interest costs, time and money. Luckily for you there are a couple of free credit monitoring services that everyone can use in order to always have a correct credit report and score.
To start with, a few years ago the federal government ordered all of the credit bureaus to allow people to get free copies of their credit reports at least once a year. This way you would be able to monitor your credit and keep in the correct standings. Trust me, you don’t want it any lower than it should be.
Since this act, a new website called annualcreditreport.com has made all of the top 3 credit bureaus credit reports available to whoever wants to access them online at least once a year. So that means every year you can check your credit score right? Yes, but look deeper, 3 reports each year, all from different places.
The smart thing to do here is check 1 every 4 months. They will all be relatively the same, as most companies report to all of them within a few months time, so every 4 months you come to the annual credit report site and check your credit with one company. The companies are Experian, Equifax and Trans Union. So, in January you can check Experian, in June check Equifax and then in October Trans Union, and keep track of each one to notice the differences between them all when you print them out.
In addition to this there are a lot of online companies that will allow you to pay a monthly fee and always be able to see your credit report, and even get notifications when something has changed. Although these are nice, they aren’t free, so when Creditkarma.com started offering people a free way to check their credit score all the time, a lot of people got excited.
You see nothing is really free, right? That’s ok, in this circumstance because you can still get your credit score everyday if you wanted to. All you have to do is sign into Creditkarma.com and check it. Now you will have a lot of ads there, no popups though, about credit cards you can apply for and such. This is how the site makes their money. It is nice though that there are no other charges, so if you don’t apply for a credit card they will still let you come back as often as you like. Just don’t get too tempted to re finance the mortgage on your home or anything because they have all sorts of credit related ads.
Between these two tools (Creditkarma.com and Annualcreditreport.com) you should be able to keep a tight rope on your credit score, and you will be the first to know if something fishy, like identity theft is going on, because you will have regular access to your numbers and reports. Though if you would like more access than every 4 months you will have to join a subscription site. Either way this will help you to have a better grip on your credit, and help you prevent accidents where things are reported wrong or to the wrong account.