Now the Fair Credit Reporting Act is a federal law that entitles you to see your report from each of the three credit bureaus; TransUnion, Equifax and Experian once every 12 months. A website was set up,, and a hotline to help you get your free report each year. How to Avoid Scam Credit Report Sites The bad news is that a thousand fake sites and scams have also been set up to trick you into thinking you're on the free credit site. Now for transparency, I do use one of the credit bureaus TransUnion to help monitor my credit and for a few other services, but I'm not going to talk about that in this video. This is only going to be about getting your free report and a strategy to monitor your credit. No sales pitches, no special offers on credit monitoring, just getting your free report. How to Get Your Credit Report from the Real Website The easiest way to get your free report is to go to the website,, and click the button that says 'request your free credit reports'. Your first screen will be for information including your name, address, social security and date of birth.
Join the Let's Talk Money community! Why You Need to Check Your Credit Report Every Year This is going to be one of the shorter videos in the series but will save you a couple hundred dollars a year, minimum. The sad fact is that you need to constantly be on top of your credit report for fraud and identity theft. More than three million complaints of fraud and ID theft were reported in 2016. That's almost six people every minute and that's just the ones that caught it. But you can only get your credit report free once a year and credit monitoring services are expensive, most charging upwards of $20 a month. I'm not only going to show you the only truly free way to get your credit report but I'll share a strategy that will help you monitor your credit for free towards the end of the video so make sure you stick around for that. Checking your credit report regularly isn't just important to protect your money but that report is the biggest factor in your credit score and being able to get the money you need when you need it.