[00:00:00] Speaker A: It is Take Control Tuesday. And that means I have Manta Moussa on the phone. And Manta, we talk about all the time checking our credit report, looking at your score, checking for problems and all that kind of things. But how do you do that? How do you get a free copy?
[00:00:14] Speaker B: Yeah, well, listen, here's the great news. You can now get a free copy of your credit report every week.
[00:00:22] Speaker A: What?
[00:00:23] Speaker B: Yeah, it used to be just once a year, but now you can get one every week. And the great thing is that you can really stay on top of potential identity theft or anything like that. Now, you're not going to get a score, okay? But what's on your report affects your score. So you need to know what's on your credit report. So here's how you get a free copy of your credit report. First of all, you go to annualcreditreport.com that's the one official site backed by the federal government where you can get your reports for free. Now, not free credit report.this, scoreboost.net or anything else.
[00:01:08] Speaker A: Got it?
[00:01:09] Speaker B: Those are generally false sites that will end up costing you money.
Just annual credit report dot com.
Now go to the site. You click on the link that says request your free credit report.
The next thing you do is enter your name, address, Social Security number, and date of birth. Then you pick the bureaus you want your credit reports from.
You could do one, or you can do all three. We're talking about TransUnion, Equifax, and Experian.
Now, once you enter your information, they're going to come back and ask you some security questions.
They may ask you about old loans, car payments, pass addresses. Some of the answers will be none of the above.
But if you don't get the questions right, you're going to have to request your report in writing and they'll send it to you by mail.
[00:02:10] Speaker A: Okay?
[00:02:10] Speaker B: But if you answer the question directly, your report will be available to you immediately. Now, once you get the report, you can save it as a PDF, you can print it. But the important thing is, don't just glance at the report.
Look at it carefully, line by line.
And what you want to look for, Accounts that you don't recognize, missed payments that aren't accurate, anything that might be marked closed that should be open, or vice versa.
Your credit report is your financial reputation in writing. So you really want to make sure you guard that. If there's something wrong on it, don't panic. You have a right to dispute it. And we'll go over that. How to do that in a later show.
So once again, you want to go to annualcreditreport.com this week. Don't put this off. Download at least one of your credit reports and look at it hard like never before.
[00:03:19] Speaker A: It's some surprising things on there. I had to do that this year after a dispute with a place that I was trying to rent. And my goodness, once I did what you put in steps, it was cleared up immediately and it raised my credit score as well. So it's very important to do that. And we'll put that information on our
[email protected] Amanda, as always, thank you.
[00:03:43] Speaker B: And remember, you can now get a free report every week if you want it.
