Ok, so maybe this is old news to a lot of you, but I just learned something today. I am sure you have all seen those free credit report commercials on t.v. In fact, its hard to miss all the advertising for credit reporting. Of course, when you go to get your free credit report, you find that it is not actually free. I decided to seek out a credit report that is actually free and I was pretty surprised at how simple it actually was. First of all, there is only one credit report agency authorized by the U.S. government. If you go to the Federal Trade Commission website: http://www.ftc.gov/freereports you will find that they indicate only http://www.annualcreditreport.com is the the one entity that is authorized to give you an annual report. One thing that is not given is your actual credit score (apparently, the fact that they summarize it using some algorithm costs you money). However, this report is incredibly useful. It gives you a history of all of your past credit, any disputes, balances, addresses, etc. As a student, this information is of great value because it shows all of your student loans as well. Although I am sure they would have no trouble finding you, student loans are often sold from one bank to another, making it difficult to track who you may owe money. This gives you a nice report of all of it. Anyway, perhaps this is old hat to most of you, but if not, I hope you find it useful. Oh and I almost forgot, the one catch is that you can only do this once a year, after that I believe there is a fee. Happy Monday!
-J
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please start off with something better on a monday than talking about credit, wtf?
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