� A credit reporting agency (CRA), also called acredit bureau, is a profit-making company thatgathers, compiles and analyzes credit informationabout individuals and then sells it to banks, mort-gage lenders, credit card companies, landlordsand even employers so they can determine thecredit rating (or credit-worthiness) of a customer.There are three nationwide CRAs: Experian,Equifax and TransUnion.� Think of your credit report as a “permanentrecord.” It lists all sorts of information about you;including where you live, whether you pay yourbills on time, whether you’ve been sued or filedfor bankruptcy. If you’ve ever applied for a creditcard, a personal loan or insurance, each CRAshould have a file on you.� Theoretically, all three of your credit reportsshould match. Realistically, don’t count on it.Often the CRAs receive information from varyingsources. Once something drops into a file—and asimple human error, like transposed digits in aSocial Security number, could put your informa-tion into my file—there it stays until you take itupon yourself to check your file. In fact, numbersfrom the Federal Trade Commission, Equifaxalone manages approximately 200 million creditfiles and makes 2 billion updates to those filesevery month. A study cited in Women’s Day mag-azine implied that nearly 80 percent of credit re-ports contain some kind of error.� You can access a copy of your three creditreports, at no cost, annually. By federal law, eachof the three CRAs must give you one free copy ofyour credit report each year, but you can’t getyour free reports from the companies them-selves— they’ll charge you a fee. Instead, go toAnnualCreditReport.com, which was set up bythe government. You can order all three of yourreports at once, or obtain them one at a time. Ifyou do the latter, stagger them throughout theyear so you can check on your credit periodically.

CREDIT CRUNCH: Manage your report onlineLearn how to conquer your credit with a free annual report

Obtaining your credit report in 3 easy stepsGo to AnnualCreditReport.com, the only website offering consumers a FREE copy of their reports, according to the FTC.

To get started, select your state from the drop-downbox and click “request report.” You may access all threeof your credit reports at once, or you may access themone at a time individually.

To request your report, complete the form. Then click“submit.” You should now be able to view or print yourreport.

From the Federal Trade Commission“Only one website is authorized to fill orders for the free annualcredit report you are entitled to under law —annualcreditreport.com. Other websites that claim to offer “freecredit reports,” “free credit scores,” or “free credit monitoring” arenot part of the legally mandated free annual credit report pro-gram. In some cases, the “free” product comes with strings at-tached. For example, some sites sign you up for a supposedly“free” service that converts to one you have to pay for after a trialperiod. If you don’t cancel during the trial period, you may be un-wittingly agreeing to let the company start charging fees to yourcredit card.Some “imposter” sites use terms like “free report” in their names;others have URLs that purposely misspell annualcreditreport.comin the hope that you will mistype the name of the official site.Some of these “imposter” sites direct you to other sites that try tosell you something or collect your personal information.Annualcreditreport.com and the nationwide consumer reportingcompanies will not send you an email asking for your personal in-formation. If you get an email, see a pop-up ad, or get a phonecall from someone claiming to be from annualcreditreport.com orany of the three nationwide consumer reporting companies, donot reply or click on any link in the message. It’s probably a scam.Forward any such email to the FTC at spam@uce.gov.”-- Source:http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/consumer/credit/cre34.pdf

Need help or have quesions about this document? E-mail laura@poplarbluff.org for more informaion.