Guide to Obtaining a Free Credit Report
A number of people are still unsure about how to get a free credit report. The only three sources of an absolutely free credit report online are Equifax, Experian, and Transunion.
These bureaus will give you an overview of your credit including open credit accounts and account activity. They will clue you in to your probable score and safeguard you from someone opening new lines of credit in your name, but they won’t give you your three-digit credit score without charging an extra fee.
To get your actual numerical credit score, there are many online sources to choose from. Doing a simple Internet search or navigating to a site like freecreditreport.com. However, you have to be incredibly careful.
The reason why is often you are going to be lured into offers that later you realize is to pay for services you may not need. It is not to say that paid credit monitoring services are not useful, it is just that often you just may not need them.
Maybe all you really need is your credit report. If this is all you need then you may just want to go to the right place-Annual Credit Report.com.
This is a website that was set up by Equifax, Experian, and Transunion as well as the federal government. Here is where people can truly get a free credit report no strings attached.
This was an effort that was made after the U.S. Federal Government required that a free copy of a credit report be issued once a year to each American. This website was birth after realizing that vendors were starting to take advantage of consumers’ lack of knowledge.
When consumers first became entitled to free credit reports, vendors began selling them something that they do not understand or need. They would give consumers a free credit report.
However, it would almost always require those consumers to unnecessarily sign up for a seven day trial which they could have gotten for free anyway. Then, if the consumers not cancel within a certain trial period, they would be billed.
The objective of developing Annual Credit Report.com was to allow consumers to monitor their own credit report for free. To this day consumers turn to this site so they can avoid paying for services they may not want or need.
The other option for free credit reports would be to turn to one of the individual credit bureaus. Equifax, Experian, and Transunion offer these documents via their home websites.