Credit Report

[Nemo]

Keep an eye on yours?  Look at one or more of the big 3 monthly?  If not, start!

I was checking mine and wife's today.  Got on Experian dot com and found a $6K lease from a small reporting agency in Utah dealing with nothing she or I had ever heard of.  Fortunately it was about a 2.5 week old reporting so the first payment was not due yet.

Filed a dispute and got them going on it.  Just that it was reported as a debt knocked her down about 45 points.  Our scores are enough that is not a big problem.

If you don't pay attention to these things-- Start.

Easiest way to start is Experian.com and start things.  You can pay a few bucks a month for more info or just take the basic and its free.  I go free.  Equifax is another easy one.  They both give you a free FICO 9 score which can give you a good idea of where you are at.

TransUnion is the last of the big 3 but they want to charge you for what you get elsewhere for no charge and give you the same info.

It also lets you keep a look on things to see if you have a long lost cousin with the your name borrowing money for you to pay back.

If you don't do it, it would be a good idea to start just to how you are and who out there may be you also.

Nemo

[JohnyMac]

Thank you Nemo. Good advise. 

[FeedingFreedom]

Our credit union provides free monitoring, as well as some of our credit cards, so check to see if that's available to you. We've never had an issue, but a relative decided to go back to school at age 40, and when they applied for a student loan, they were pretty surprised to find that someone had already taken out $200k in student loans in their name. Took years to really straighten out. The person never had to pay the money back, and was not criminally charged, as it's such a low priority crime. Pretty sure that all of us taxpayers just ate that debt, since they were federally-underwritten loans.