Once again I’m late on getting my last credit report for the year writeup but here we go. As many of you may know, you are entitled by law to a copy of your credit report from each of the 3 credit bureaus once per year. It is a good idea to spread these out and request one report every 4 months. This lets you keep an eye on your credit report throughout the year and makes it more likely that you will quickly notice any inaccuracies or problems with the report.
I just retrieved my credit report from TransUnion and all is well. Another 4 months (January 2008) and I’ll check with Experian.
To request your free credit report go to: AnnualCreditReport.com
The credit report is free, but the credit bureaus try and convince you to pay for additional services (credit score, credit monitoring, etc). So be sure to say No to any of these items if you want a truly free credit report. Silly TransUnion has you create a login and then wants you to use it a year later when you come back. Good luck with that. I had to re-authenticate since I had forgotten my username and password.
Now go ahead and pull yours and make sure everything looks ok. It is a sad fact of life that your credit history is extremely important and can open or close many doors based on what information it contains.
And as I always say, if you really want to spice up your love live with your significant other, how about exchanging credit reports with that special someone. Honesty in a long-term relationship is extremely important, and if you can’t be open about your financial standing then you really aren’t sharing everything. Plus, nobody wants to find out a week after the honeymoon that your partner is $100,000 in credit card debt 🙂
Also here is a link to the Federal Trade Commission’s site regarding your free annual credit report: http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/edcams/freereports/psa.html