Andrew Mason asked: Obtaining a free copy of your credit report is very important if you believe that there might be some misinformation no there, or if you are going to be working with a financial institution anytime soon.
Obviously, the better your credit score is, the lower interest rate you will be paying, and vise versa. Therefore, knowing this info is crucial.
Keep in mind that a free instant copy of your credit report is only available via the net, and in fact you can’t get a hard copy even if you wanted one (although there is really no reason to).
If you do want a regular copy of your credit report, you will usually have to wait around fifteen days to receive it, sometimes more and sometimes less. However, it is not always free, as you will soon find out, depending on what kind you want.
First of all, your annual report is a track record of your payments in the past year, and everybody in the US is entitled to get one of these per year from any of the three major credit report firms around the country.
However, in order to get this, you will need a lot of personal information to prove that you are indeed who you claim, or else you won’t get a totally free credit report. This shouldn’t be hard, but is a necessary pat of the process you should keep in mind, so be sure you have the information needed on hand.
Getting a free copy of your credit report once a year is generally enough for the majority of people, as you won’t have occasion to need it any more under ordinary circumstances.
Be sure, however, that you review it thoroughly when you do, because it’s likely you won’t look at it for another year, so pour over the transactions you’ve made over the past year, and be sure that they are all correct.
If any of them have you being late on a payment you know you made on time, dispute it with the credit repot company. When you do this, they will simply contact the company in question that you had the transaction with, and assuming you are in the right, they will confirm your point of view, and it will be removed from your record.
Therefore, get a free copy of your credit report online, review it carefully, and the next time you wan to do business with a financial institution, and you will be able to obtain a great interest rate.
Harold
