Five Cent Dime

Those tunes may be catchy, but www.freecreditreport.com isn’t the place to go to get your “no strings attached” free credit report.   They require you to sign up for a 7 day trial which, if you don’t cancel within that time period, will end up costing you $14.95/month thereafter.

Don’t you dare pay to get your credit report. You are entitled by law to one free credit report per year, per person, per credit bureau. The credit bureaus are Experian, Equifax and Transunion, but you do not go to their individual sites to get your report.

You want to go to www.annualcreditreport.com which will allow you to access any or all of the three free reports.  If you are single then it may be best to check one report from one bureau once every 4 months (i.e. Jan, May, Sept) and if you are married then you could even stagger each of your reports (i.e. Jan, Mar, May, Jul) to make sure you are always on top of any changes that you caused or you may also catch fraud or identity theft.

Do not pay for your credit score either. For a very consumer friendly site you can go to www.creditkarma.com and get unlimited free credit scores with a chart to track the monthly progress or regress of your financial credit “health”. Credit Karma never requires a credit card to get the free scores and does not require you to sign up for a free trial.

Also www.quizzle.com will give you a free credit report with no credit card required. It gives you a credit score but it is not a true “FICO” score and tends to be slightly less reliable than others I have seen.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 15th, 2009 at 11:18 PM and is filed under Finance & Money. 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.