Lot of people may not realize that their credit is one of the most important things in their life. Without credit one may not be able to rent or buy your very own place, getting that car that you always wanted, or even getting the job they are looking for. Having no credit or bad credit will increase the interest rate one has to pay if you wind up getting a credit card or a mortgage.

Free credit report should be free and not sign you up for some other credit report monitoring service and tell you if you don’t want to be charge you need to cancel it within a certain time period. Who has time to mark down on their calendar to cancel it in 30 days. If you try to cancel it early you usually get some salesperson who is trying to convince you that its a benefit to you for them to monitor your credit for you. They may even try to give you a extra month free, now you have to listen to some high pressure sales pitch about why its good to pay for something that you were not even looking for. There may not be such a thing as a free lunch, by there is such a thing call free credit report. Starting on September 1, 2005, people from all 50 states will be able to receive their credit report for free from the only source authorized to do this, which is annualcreditreport.com.

We all have seen ads that promise to fix your bad credit if you pay a fee, these companies don’t really have any magic or power to fix something that is true. What these companies do is the same things that you can do yourself. They simply write the same letters that you can write, to the credit agency and point out the negative references on your report. The credit agency will than have 30 days to verify the information with the reporting organization. At this point the reporting organization can investigate the claim and give proof that it is valid or simply ignore. When it is deem valid the negative information stays in the report and if it is ignore it it will be removed from the credit agency. To read more about fixing your credit go to the FTC site.

Its a very good idea to regularly review your credit report for a variety of reasons, one major reason is to check for signs of identity theft.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 1st, 2005 at 9:10 pm and is filed under Personal Finance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.