Big News About Access to Your Credit History
Do you regularly check your credit reports? If so, you are likely aware that during the Covid 19 pandemic, the three national credit bureaus (Equifax, Experian, and Transunion) decided to make credit reports available to consumers once a week, free of charge.
Prior to the pandemic, you were only able to access these reports once a year without being charged. (You may remember the cheesy commercials in which they sang cheesy songs about your ability to access these reports?)
This free access has been scheduled to be “temporary”, but the dates on which it was supposed to end kept getting pushed back by the credit bureaus. Most recently, the temporary access was scheduled to cease at the end of 2023.
In a “surprise” announcement this week, the credit bureaus advised that the free access would now be permanent!
Why Should You Check Your Credit Reports On A Regular Basis?
It’s difficult to monitor how your financial credit is reported without checking it on a regular basis. Some creditors, like credit card companies, auto lenders and mortgage lenders are extremely diligent about contacting you and letting you know that your payment is late. Other creditors do a less than stellar job of letting you know about problems with your account.
We advise our clients to look at their credit reports once a month, preferably on the same day each month.
Why once a month? Your accounts only report to the national credit bureaus once a month. Looking at your reports more frequently than that won’t offer you an accurate picture of your current credit history. Some of your accounts may be reporting history from the current month, some may still be reporting history from the last month.
Why look at your report on the same day of the month? This is the best way to perform an “apples to apples” review of your history. Reviewing reports on the same day ensures that you are looking at the same credit data that you looked at the prior month. (Absent the appearance of new accounts or old accounts “aging off” of your reports.
What Should You Be Looking At On Your Reports?
The first thing that you should search for is accounts that you don’t recognize. If you see an account that you know doesn’t properly belong to you, it’s a strong indication that you may have had your identity stolen. The sooner you identify potential identity theft, the sooner you can take steps to catch the thief and keep them from damaging your credit further.
Your credit report contains information about your financial accounts, including loans and credit cards. They show your outstanding balances, your credit limits on credit card accounts, your payment history (including any recent late payments!), collection accounts, charged off accounts and credit inquiries.
Your reports will also provide any variations of your name as well as any past addresses reported by your creditors. The presence of any names or addresses that have never been used by you can also be a strong indication of potential identity theft.
Free Credit Reports, Not Free Credit Scores
Be aware that you are only being provided with your credit history for free, not your credit scores. If you want to learn about your scores, there are websites that will provide it to you for free, but more often than not those sites are not providing you with the same credit scores that are utilized by lenders. (Credit Karma, likely the most widely used credit monitoring site utilizes a score called a Vantage Score, which is calculated in a whole different way than the FICO credit scores that are relied upon by most lenders.)
How To Access Your Free Reports
As often as once every seven days, you can access your report from each of the three credit bureaus at annualcreditreport.com. (Anyone else see a name change in this website’s future?)
You will have to provide some information to the site, including your Social Security number, present address, phone number and date of birth. You will have to access each of the individual credit agency reports, one at a time. You can view those reports online or download them individually.
Have Questions?
Give Phoenix Credit Consultants a call at (314) 429-2040 or email us at info@123pcc.com. We will be happy to assist you in obtaining your free credit reports or answer any questions that you might have after you review your reports!