All of those get your “free credit reports” commercials on TV! The problem is, none of these programs are actually free! All of them require you to sign up and pay for some kind of a credit monitoring service. While in this day and age of identity theft it is good idea for all of us to monitor our credit, in most cases it is just not necessary to sign up for any of these programs. You can accomplish almost to the same thing yourself, and unlike all of these programs, it really is FREE.

A law was passed a few years ago that allows you to request one free copy of your credit report once a year, from each of the three national credit reporting agencies: Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion.

To make process even easier, you can go to one website to request your reports: AnnualCreditReport.com

How to use AnnualCreditReport.com

The best way to take advantage of this law is to stagger your requests from the three credit bureaus over the year, requesting a report from a different agency every four months or so.

For example: Request your free report from Experian in January, TransUnion in May, and Equifax in September, then start back over with Experian in January. Using this method you will be able to see at least one of your credit files at three different times over the year, which will be a good indicator of any problems. While this is not quite as good as seeing all three files each month, for most of us this is often enough, and there are NO MONTHLY FEES!

Obviously  if you have reason to believe you may have an identity theft problem, you can always immediately request reports from all agencies.

If you have already enrolled in a credit monitoring service, cancel it and use this process instead!

It’s your money… Save it!

Richard Schardt

Kernersville, NC

richard@TriadHomesGroup.com

Tags: credit, Credit bureau, Credit history, Credit score, Equifax, Experian, Identity theft, TransUnion