All Americans are entitled to a free credit report once a year. There are many sites and services being advertised that allow you to obtain your credit report. However, there is only one site that is authorized by the Free Credit Report Program and that is:

annualcreditreport.com

You can order your reports over the phone, online, or through the mail. If you order online, you can download them over a secure link and view them immediately.

Ordering online is simple. First you visit the Annual Credit Report site and enter your information. Then select which agencies you’d like to get a report from (select all 3!). When that is completed, the Annual Credit Report will bump you over to each site one by one to sign in and view your report for free.

A couple notes about the process. Some will ask you to further verify some information about yourself, based on information in your credit report. Simple questions that you should only know the answers to like who is your mortgage or car loan with, how much do you pay, etc. After that step, just about all of the agencies will want to sell you additional reports. If you’d like to see your credit score, that will cost you a few extra dollars. If you’d just like to see your credit report, go ahead and skip the additional offers and continue through. You are not obligated to buy those.

After you’re in, review the information and dispute any incorrect information. All of the agencies tend to have a link or tools to do so. When you’re done with one agency, click the specified link to go back to Annual Credit Report and hit the next agency.

Finally, your free reports will only be available for about a month or so. Be sure to print them all out and save them for your records if you’d like to keep them. Be sure to have a good amount of paper handy, especially if you have a lot of information in your report. All the agencies offer printer-friendly versions of your report, but some will use up more paper than others. I think Equifax is the worst as their format spit out a whopping 27 pages for my personal report. Experian clocked in at 15 pages while Transunion printed 9.

Nonetheless, good information to look over and it’s available for free right now. Once again, that site is annualcreditreport.com

This entry was posted on Monday, December 10th, 2007 at 12:54 am and is filed under Identity Theft, Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.