3 reasons to read your credit report regularly

Plenty of people are talking about the fact that you can go to AnnualCreditReport.com and get your credit report online for free once a year. And that’s fine, but looking at your credit report once a year isn’t good enough.

Too many things can happen over the course of 365 days. Here’s why you need to check your credit report more often:

1. If you found mistakes and asked to have them corrected, you won’t know if it’s been done.
2. New mistakes can happen the day after you’ve read your credit report.
3. Signs of identity theft that go unnoticed can escalate into huge trouble over the course of a year.

To be fair, the credit bureaus will attempt to correct any errors that you correctly report to them. But with all the data they have to process, it isn’t wise to assume that they’ll take care of your problem correctly.

Next, a new mistake can be reported just hours after you’ve read your report. And for some strange reason, errors are usually not in your favor.

It would be great if an error helped your credit scores. But the more likely scenario is that it will be information belonging to someone who never paid a bill on time in his or her adult life.

Or – it will be an error in data entry that says you owe an extra $10,000 and have maxed out your credit card, or that you’re 120 days late with payment. Either error can send your credit scores to the basement.

If you’re not watching your credit report, you’ll have no idea that the error is sitting there, hurting your chances of getting a job, obtaining new credit, or getting good interest rates if you do manage to get new credit.

Finally, identity theft is a threat that no one can afford to ignore. It’s big business and it can happen to anyone. And, if you don’t catch it quickly, it can destroy your credit rating and take months or even years to straighten out.

You might not know it’s happened until you’re turned down flat on a job application, until some creditor tracks you down with a demand for many thousands of dollars, or until the IRS writes to ask why you failed to report a big chunk of your income.

To be safe, you need to check your credit report regularly, and you can do so inexpensively when you order your credit report online from www.creditscorequick.com and take advantage of one of the monitoring services.