Free Credit Reports

With your credit report, you couldn’t access this kind of information for free in the ‘90s. But it is something that everybody needs to do, and it’s easy enough by going to the official site, annualcreditreport.com. Here’s the thing: your scores determine your interest rates, whether someone will rent to you, if a cell-phone provider will give you a cell phone, et cetera. And in many cases, there’s massive misinformation on your credit report: up to 25 percent of people report that there were errors on their report. Now, how would you know there were errors if you were never able to look at your credit reports? In this day and age, you’ve got to know this information. We’re living in an era of identify theft, and it’s not a difficult thing to just check your report (or check your aging parents’, or your kids’) and know their information is safe. We’ve become such a technologically advanced society, but it’s a double-edged sword: it makes this kind of fraud easier, but the technology also gives us a chance to look at our financial information. Americans do not have an excuse anymore, and checking your credit score is one of the top three things I recommend whenever I speak: you need to get yourself out of credit-card debt, you need to set up your own emergency fund, and you need to check your credit report. It’s that simple.