Sunday, March 1, 2009

Free Credit Reports Now Available From the FTC

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has launched a new website (www.AnnualCreditReport.com), if U.S. citizens can stay for free copies of their credit reports from the three major credit reporting agencies (Equifax, Experian and TRANS UNION). The FTC site was set up under the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act, adopted in December last year. The site was in an effort to combat the growing threat of identity theft. Credit reports must be ordered by the FTC website to get them for free. If you order your credit report directly from a credit-reporting agencies pages, you will be a fee for the report.

While a number of websites on the Internet currently offer credit reports, these reports free of charge a credit card on file as a free trial membership of their credit report monitoring service. The reports are free, if you remember to cancel the trial membership, but can be quite expensive at the end, if you accidentally forget. The new FTC site is marketing free and no credit card required credit reports are not yet for all U.S. citizens. They will be phased in over the next year through the region to prevent the system is not overwhelmed. Currently, residents living in Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming, the credit reports. Inhabitants in the Midwest may be their credit reports starting in March, residents in the south starts in June and residents in the East begins in September.

Instead of ordering credit reports from all three credit reporting agencies at once, you may consider staggering the three reports so that you will receive a credit report every 4 months. In this way, you can see how your credit report will change with time, and if you find an error, were corrected. It also increases the chances that you catch any attempts at identity theft more quickly. If you have a large purchase like a house or car, if your credit score used to determine your eligibility, you want all three at once. This will allow you to all sorts of problems as quickly as possible.

If you have received your reports, review each carefully. The three credit reporting agencies million pieces per year of information and errors in some estimates more than half of all credit reports with a large error in one of four. By making sure that all information in the reports is correct, make sure you have the best rates from credit agencies in the future.

Now that credit reports are free, there is no reason not to require it every year. Keeping tabs on your credit report is one of the most effective ways to make headway against identity theft and make sure that all the information that your creditors access is correct.

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