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.