I celebrated my birthday recently.  I’m one year closer to the life of leisure and adventure that I have planned for my retirement!  And aside from a lovely day of doing my favorite things, I like to use my birthday as a reminder for things that should be done once a year.

One of the things people should do once a year is look at their credit report.  Your credit report is basically a history of all the things (both good and bad) that have been happening in your financial life.  It will show you all of your loans and where you stand in repayment.  It will show you all of your open lines of credit.  It will show you a history of closed lines of credit.  It will even show you who has been looking at your credit.  And just like with everything, it’s not always going to be correct.  That’s why it is important to look at it once in a while.

The federal government has set it up so you have access to a free copy of your credit report once a year, from each of the three major credit bureaus (Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion).  And while the pandemic continues you actually have access to a free report once per week.  But there is a lot of confusion about how to access this information for free.  There are a lot of places where they are happy to charge you a fee for this information…or even worse, set you up on a recurring subscription.  All to get information you have the right to see for free.

To request your free reports, you should visit http://annualcreditreport.com.  This is the site set up by the government to allow you this free access.   The site will ask for your Social Security number and ask you questions about your credit accounts to verify your identity (so no one else should be able to access your information).  And then, you’ll have all of the information you want about your credit history.  All of your accounts.  Whether you have a history of late payments.  How much you owe.  It’s all laid out for you.

Once I looked at my credit report and found an error.  A big error.  A mortgage that had been paid off in a refinance was showing as open.  It looked like I had about $80,000 in debt more than I actually did.  And I had to jump through some hoops and fax a bunch of documents to get it corrected.  And that’s why it’s important to look at this stuff from time to time.  It’s absolutely better to find credit report errors on your own rather than be surprised when a loan request is denied.

Whether or not you are celebrating your birthday, you should probably take a few minutes and review your credit report.  The best gift of all is peace of mind.