No matter what your financial situation is — whether you’re getting ready to purchase a home or you’re working on getting out of debt — you should have a good idea of what’s on your credit report. Because your credit report is the key factor for lenders trying to decide just how much credit they’ll extend to you for mortgages, credit cards or car loans,not knowing your credit report can set you up for a nasty surprise.
As long as you live in the U.S., you are entitled to a free copy of your credit report every year from each of the three main reporting agencies (TransUnion, Equifax and Experian). And to make the process easy, all three reports are available through the same website: AnnualCreditReport.com. You can also obtain your credit report through a toll-free number or a mailing address available on the site. AnnualCreditReport.com is the only site that is actually required to give you a free copy of your credit report: there are hundreds of other websites available online that offer to do the same thing, but most of them are effectively scams — they require you to sign up for other services to get a free credit report or use other techniques to get money from you.
To receive a credit report from AnnualCreditReport.com, you’ll need to provide some personal information (including your Social Security number) and answer a series of questions about your past credit, such as what car you owned at a given time, in order to prove that you are, in fact, you. This system is intended to protect your credit information. If you can’t answer all credit questions correctly — and don’t worry if you can’t; I couldn’t and there wasn’t anything wrong with my credit — you’ll be asked to provide some further information via mail.
I don’t recommend getting all three credit reports at once — instead, you can, in a way, game the system. I get a credit report every four months: TransUnion in January, Experian in May and Equifax in September. This way, I have a good idea of what’s happening with my credit year round. Not all of my credit activity shows up on all three reports because some lenders report to only one or two, but I still have a general picture.
When you receive your credit report, you should check it over and make sure that you recognize each item on the report. If you find an item that you need to dispute, you will need to contact the credit reporting agency to both file a dispute and to request a fraud alert to be placed on your file, if you feel that you may have been a victim of identity theft.
