- Well, congratulations,
you wanna check your free credit report.
Follow along with me,
I'm gonna, show exactly what you need to do here.
(logo shimmers)
Welcome to "Tech Tip Tuesday",
a segment of this channel where I share
a privacy or security tip,
that you can start using in five minutes or less.
Today, we're talking about free credit reports,
and I want you to look over my shoulder on my computer
as I check mine and then you can follow along.
Now, I'm starting here on annualcreditreport.com.
This is one of three different ways
that you can request your credit report.
You can do so here on this website,
you can go to the Individual Credit Bureau's websites
that would be the Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion,
such as this TransUnion here
and you can request your credit score and report or,
you can even mail in your credit report request
and they will, within 15 days
send back your credit report to you.
So those are the three ways,
but I do wanna make sure that I warn you ahead of time.
There is a lot of fraud
related to this annual credit report.
You wanna make sure that if you are doing it,
you are only doing it in one of these three methods
that I've described here,
and then I'm leading in the description below.
Because you don't wanna land on a website
where you're giving away
all of this very personal information.
Make sure that you're looking at annualcreditreport.com
or you are on a specific website
for one of the credit bureaus.
So, we're gonna start with annual credit report.
If I wanted to request my free credit report,
I can go here and then request this credit report.
And what you're gonna see,
and I'm not gonna actually fill it out for you in person,
but you're gonna have all this information
where you have to put in your first name, your last name,
birthday, social security number.
This is common.
So, I'm gonna pause for just a moment,
fill out this information
so you can see what the next page looks like.
Now, here we are in this page.
What you're gonna see is you have the opportunity to request
all three credit bureau credit reports on you
at the same time,
or you can space it out and as much time as you want.
If you're doing this just to do
checks every once in a while throughout the year,
I would advise spacing it out once over every four months.
So, I could check all three of these and then click next,
or I could just check one of them.
And what it's gonna do is it's gonna bring me through
the process of seeing each of these credit reports,
one at a time,
just looking through and seeing my credit report.
What we wanna do is we wanna look through this information
and at the end of it,
you don't wanna be surprised by what you find.
I'm gonna do my best here to not
blur out any as much information that I can,
obviously I can't show you everything,
but I wanna give you an idea of what you're looking at.
So, here on your credit report,
we're looking at the date, my score, balances, payments,
credit accounts, all of that stuff.
And if you know,
let's say you've got five or six credit cards,
a few different bank accounts,
but if it's wildly absurd,
if you've got a lot of credit accounts,
that's something that you should be worried about.
As we browse down, we wanna to make sure that
our personal information looks the way it should.
Are the names correct?
Is your date of birth and address
and previous addresses correct?
Because if there's an address there that doesn't look right,
you're gonna need to report that.
Inquiries or any inquiries that have been made,
credit pulls by let's say a car dealership
when you're trying to buy a car,
or a bank when you're trying to refinance your home
or even buy a new home,
those kinda balance inquiries
are what's gonna be shown here.
And then the last, but certainly not least are the accounts.
What accounts have been opened,
and do they look right?
Are these the different accounts that you have,
and are there balances?
So if you see an account that you don't recognize
or a balance that it's absurdly high that you don't have,
again, that's a red flag,
something that you need to be looking at.
Installments are things that are more longterm,
such as a car loan or a mortgage.
So do you have any of those and what is the balance here?
So all of these, and then of course, any public records.
So you can start a dispute on any of these things.
So if there's somebody that is opened a credit card,
that you did not authorize under your name,
you need to start a dispute.
Likewise, if you feel like you're the
victim of identity theft,
one of the first things you need to do
is you need to go over to Identity Theft.gov
and start that process of telling them what happened
and then getting a recovery plan,
because it is not gonna be something that's very fun.
And that's one of the reasons
why we're checking our credit report
is to make sure that our information is not being stolen,
it's not being used for reasons that we did not allow.
If you feel like
your information is at high risk of being stolen,
then a credit monitoring service
is something that you should consider.
You can do that through the credit bureaus themselves,
I prefer to do it with a
kind of a third party like LifeLock.
I think of this almost like,
if you were, let's say that you've got your home
and you've got deadbolts on your doors.
Those are just your regular security measures.
But if you're particularly worried
about the neighborhood you live in,
you might set up a house alert alarm system.
And that's kind of what a credit monitoring system is,
is it's just, it's not gonna necessarily
stop people from coming in,
but it's gonna let you know the moment that it happens.
These kinda services, these LifeLock annual services,
I've got links.
Those are affiliate links down in the description below but,
but they can be useful
if you think that's something that you need.
It's not for everybody,
but it is something that if you are at higher risk,
if you've been a victim of identity theft in the past,
it is definitely something that you need to subscribe to
to make sure that it doesn't happen again.
Now, before we end,
I have three really important things that I need to add
to make sure that you understand.
And I'm gonna give them an order of importance.
The first is this;
do not,
I repeat, do not do your free credit report
on a public computer or on public WiFi,
for the sake of the fact that
you are sending so much sensitive information for the,
in order to get this free credit report,
you wanna make sure you're doing this on your computer
or your device on your home network.
So just wait till you get home
and do it at home on your own computer.
Second,
remember that as you're doing this credit report,
you're only doing it for one person.
That one person potentially being you.
So if you have a spouse or somebody else in your household,
you wanna make sure that you're doing it
for everybody in your, because a,
an identity that's been stolen
of anybody in your household affects everybody.
You don't wanna find out that,
"Oh, my credit report was fine,
but I forgot to check my wife's and sh
and hers had a problem."
And then finally, last but not least,
make sure that you're not paying for this credit report.
It is a free service that we are given.
And if you find yourself
giving over your credit card information
for the purpose of paying for any type of
service related to this,
you are either doing something beyond just a credit report
or you are on a fraudulent website
and you need to get off immediately.
So be very sensitive to that fact.
This is a free service,
do not be paying for anything.
So that's how you check your free credit report.
Because there are three credit bureaus here in the US
you could theoretically check your free credit report
once every four months.
And it's something that I advise that you do,
maybe go ahead and put that into your calendar right now,
so that you're making sure that
your identity isn't getting stolen
or that a bank account isn't being opened in your name.
So if you wanna check out
more great "Tech Tip Tuesday" videos,
I've got that entire playlist here.
Make sure you subscribe to AllThingsSecured,
and I look forward to making another great
security video for you next week.