All of us need to take some time every so often to knock things off our financial to-do list. To help, we’ve created a series of articles and an interactive checklist to get you started.
For many years now, every American adult has been entitled to get one free credit report every year from each of the big three credit bureaus, Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. But millions of people don’t bother obtaining them, which has never made much sense to me.
The biggest reason to check is self-protection. If a thief has opened a new credit account in your name, you want to know about it. And if they have, there’s a decent chance it will have shown up on one of the three reports. Errors are common as well, so you want to correct them lest they affect your credit history.
You can get your reports for free at annualcreditreport.com, which is the site that the federal government made available to citizens who wish to get their free reports. Your report is not free at freecreditreport.com, oddly enough, but that is its own tale.
You can give yourself regular credit checks by grabbing one of the three reports every four months. An Experian report won’t be identical to an Equifax one, say, but credit information often ends up on all three reports eventually.
Your FICO credit scores, alas, are not free. You can buy some versions of them at myfico.com though.