I hadn’t talked about this before, because sometimes I get so immersed in the whole personal finance blogosphere I start to think if I know it, everyone else must already know it too. I did that with snowflaking – because it was one of the few “financial” type things I already knew about before I started the blog, I just assumed it was common knowledge. But obviously, it wasn’t, and it was a good use of my time and effort to explain the concept of snowflaking and help spread the word about attacking debt, savings, or even investments in that manner.

Obtaining my credit report for free (sans score) once a year was something I knew that I was legally able to do before I started the blog, but I actually didn’t know where to get it. After a conversation a few nights ago with some coworkers about the “Free Credit Report dot com” commercials and my explaining where to REALLY get your free credit report, I realized that because of the clever and incessant marketing by the aforementioned company, a lot of people may not actually know where to obtain their credit report for free, no strings attached, and it made me want to spread the word.

The “go-to” site for your FREE credit report, no strings attached, is www.annualcreditreport.com . This is the official site to request your free yearly credit report, and was created by the three nationwide consumer credit reporting companies – Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. You will not get your credit score from this service, but you will get a free copy of your entire credit report from any or all of the three reporting agencies. You can request a report from each of the three agencies once per year. Many people who use the service will rotate their requests so they can see their credit report more frequently – for example, in January request from Equifax, in May from TransUnion, and then in September from Experian. That way you get a more frequent snapshot of your credit report than once yearly. Generally, the three credit reporting agencies will have similar (but not identical) information on their reports.

Last June I requested all three of mine at once for the very first time, simply because I had never done it before. I decided I wanted to see all three for myself and see how similar they were, since I had never requested one before. They were in my case pretty similar after all, so going forward I have a different plan. Generally, I am going to request one every 6 months (one in July and one in January, rotating through the three on an 18 month cycle), because I want to have one available to check if I am worried or concerned that something may not be right. For example, last year soon after I had already requested all three of my reports, I got a letter from a company I had never heard of called Certegy, telling my my personal data had potentially been breached. Turns out they are a check/bank account verification service that had been used by, among other companies, Amazon, which is how they had my data. I would have liked to been able to request a free copy of one of my credit reports a month after that happened to keep an eye on things.

If you’ve never checked your credit report, now is the time to start! Request at least one of the three company’s report today, for free, and make sure it is accurate. If you find errors, you can then contact the company that furnished your report to correct or dispute them. Happy credit checking!

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