Your credit report is a list of all your debt accounts, including your mortgage, student and automobile loans, credit cards, personal installment loans and revolving lines of credit. Additionally, your credit report lists negative items like delinquent loan accounts, charged-off credit cards, collection accounts and foreclosures. Your credit report can affect your job prospects, ability to purchase a home or a car and your access to personal loans and credit cards.
Time Frame
The federal Fair Credit Reporting Act allows you to access free copies of your credit reports from all three consumer reporting bureaus---Equifax, TransUnion and Experian---once per 12-month period. Although this is known as the "annual credit report rule," you need not request your reports at the start of the new year. Instead, you can request your reports at any point during a year, and you will be able to access them again on the same month and day of the following year.
Methods
You may request your reports online at AnnualCreditReport.com, over the telephone or by mail (see Resources). Requesting your credit reports online will allow you to view your documents from TransUnion, Equifax and Experian instantly on your computer. In contrast, ordering your credit reports by mail or telephone will prompt the consumer reporting agencies to send your reports by mail, which can take up to 15 days, says the Federal Trade Commission.
Benefits
Getting free annual credit reports once per year allows you to see exactly what banks, credit card companies, mortgage lenders, prospective employers and rental agencies see when they check your credit file. Additionally, it will allow you to verify that your credit information---including financial accounts, delinquencies, addresses and employers---are correct. If they are not, you can dispute the information with each of the three credit bureaus at no cost (see Resources). You can file a dispute with the credit bureaus online or over the telephone. Additionally, Equifax and TransUnion allow you to file disputes through the mail.
Considerations
Like the name suggests, an annual credit report only allows you to access your reports once per year. You can access your credit reports at other times, however, you will have to pay a fee to the credit bureaus from which you request a report. Additionally, annual credit reports do not include copies of your FICO score, the three-digit number that measures your creditworthiness. You will need to request your FICO rating separately for a fee.
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