The beginning Together with Experian and TransUnion, Equifax is one of the three biggest credit bureaus in the United States of America. These CRAs maintain credit records on customers who provide a history of credit status, credit card information, loans, mortgages, and every other kind of credit fact. Your Equifax credit report determines your creditworthiness; lenders use information in your report to approve credit applications.
Many consumers ask this question – is there any fee to get my Equifax credit report?
Annual Credit Reports Available for Free On the plus side, once a year people may get a free credit report from Equifax. This is so because of the FACTA, which lets every customer get one free copy of his credit report from any one of the three national CRAs yearly. See www.AnnualCreditReport.com to get the free yearly credit reports. The only Web site authorized by the Federal Trade Commission to provide free reports is this one.
When you are getting your reports at AnnualCreditReport.com, you are required to provide your information including complete name, date of birth, SSN, and current address to guarantee you are the person you claim to be. From the bureaus, you may choose one, two, or even three of the credit reports you want to see. Whether you purchase one, the second one, or all three of them at once, this will be your free yearly access; you can only obtain a free annual report next year.
Other Path to Obtain Your Equifax Report Apart from your free yearly credit reports from AnnualCreditReport.com, there are various more ways you might get a copy of your Equifax credit report for free:
- Should you have been refused credit in the previous sixty days, you might get Equifax's report because the firm that declined your credit application cannot utilize it without a copy.
- Equifax will provide one free credit report to jobless individuals who plan to hunt for work within 60 days to help them know how their credit appears to the lender, the employer, etc.
- If you are on public assistance and you get food stamps, Medicaid, or welfare payments, you might be entitled to a free Equifax report whenever you so like.
- Should you believe your identity was stolen or you are a victim of fraud, you may get a free copy of the Equifax report if you have any such record of dishonest conduct.
- Residents of several states—Colorado, Georgia, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Puerto Rico, and Vermont—get one or more extra free credit reports yearly.
How to Buy Your Equifax Credit Report You’ll have to buy a copy of your Equifax report if?
It has been less than a year since you last ordered free annual credit reports and you don’t qualify under any of the aforementioned criteria. Equifax offers an online credit report for $19. 95 easily accessible through their website.
You can also order an Equifax report, containing your credit score, for yourself. Equifax credit scores vary from 280 to 850. Some of the Equifax services include; Joining the Equifax credit file, and Equifax credit report with a credit score of $24. 95 online. Orders involving paper orders done offline attract an additional processing fee of $5. 95.
One thing is for sure nobody has to pay to get to know their credit score. Nowadays several credit card companies and personal finance websites offer credit scores with the creation of an account. It is also possible to obtain your credit score for an even lower price if you only require the number and not the whole report.
Why One Should Regularly Check One’s Equifax Report It is still beneficial to review your credit report even if you have to pay for it, to view your Equifax credit report. Maintaining credit reports is an effective way of regularly monitoring for any negative entries that should not be in your profile and the best way to remove them is by disputing them. It means that only accurate Equifax reports can be controlled to prevent the situations that lead to the manipulation of credit history; and second, it means that only the knowledge of how your credit history is viewed by lenders, enables you to exercise responsible credit consumption.
Although, by law, you are entitled to one free copy of your Equifax credit report every 12 months, credit monitoring does come with a fee associated with it most of the time, with Equifax. The rest of the features may be of interest to consumers who need more Equifax credit reports during the year, and decide whether the cost benefit is worth it. For most people, the steps you have outlined concerning getting free annual reports from AnnualCreditReport.com and tracking the free credit scores may be enough for credit monitoring.
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