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Home arrow Credit Score & Report arrow How to Get Your Free Annual Credit Report
How to Get Your Free Annual Credit Report
How to Get Your Free Annual Credit Report Thankfully you can get your free annual credit report from all three credit reporting agencies, but it’s more of a hassle than it should be.

Thanks to a federal law passed in 2003 called the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act (FACT Act), you don’t have to spend any money getting your reports. Under this law, consumers can request and obtain a free credit report once every 12 months from each of the three nationwide consumer credit reporting companies.

Log on to www.annualcreditreport.com and you can request 3 separate reports from the 3 agencies from one place. Keep in mind that this website does not give you your score, only your reports.

My experience with www.annualcreditreport.com

Although it’s free, (it should be!) the site itself is fairly easy to navigate, but the process of getting your reports is not as simple.

Annualcreditreport.com does not collect you reports for you. It sends you off to the three agencies websites through links and merely keeps track of which ones you’ve been to. Once at an agencies site, say Equifax, you follow the links to your free report, then follow the link back to annualcreditreport.com, which send you to the next one. This is very confusing in my opinion.

Another beef I have is that you get very little assistance at the agencies websites. I guess I should have expected this, since you are not a “paying customer”. Isn’t it standard procedure that when you sign up for access to something online that you get an email with your username and password? Not the case here.

I lost my access information and had to call Equifax to get it back. The others sent welcome emails, but never included any information on how to return an view your report. They warn you to print the report right then an there (big bold letters), giving you the impression that you will never see it again. They are partly right.

I got around this by saving my report into an html document (in IE, File, Save As…). But I also figured that if you go back to www.annualcreditreport.com, you can go thru the same motions as before to see your report at each site. You can view the report for up to 30 days.

Getting your credit report each year and reviewing it for errors and inaccuracies is a central part in maintaining good credit and getting out of debt. Never let a year go by without it, as lingering errors could be costing you money in terms of getting better interest rates on mortgages and car loans. Dispute errors and inaccuracies that you find and you will be on your way to better credit score.

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