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Here’s what consumer advocate Clark Howard says: “Credit freezes are the most effective tool against economic ID theft available to consumers.” So I wonder, why aren’t more people doing it? My husband Mark and I recently had to remove the security freeze from our credit reports to allow a ‘third party’, a potential landlord in this matter, to take a look at our credit. We were renting new office space and the broker was running a normal credit check on both of us. When we explained that it would take him a day to walk, as we had to start the lift – he was a bit taken aback. In fact, he hadn’t heard of the security freeze.
I’m always a little shocked when I find out how many people put freezes on their credit reports. In general, it is not expensive. Where we live in CA it costs us about $10 to lift each freeze and they may need to be lifted once every 3-4 years depending on what we’re doing. In the most recent case, we asked which reporting service the broker used, he told us Experian, so we only picked that one. The cost then was $20 for both me and Mark.
And yes, it’s kind of a pain in the butt – but it’s just administrative kind of pain in the butt stuff. It takes one or more phone calls (depending on whether you have to do all three) or an online lift and – in either case you need to know your PIN number for each of the credit reporting services, Experian, Equifax and TransUnion Will happen. , So you have to be somewhat organized in terms of being able to safely store and find your PIN. About a year ago, this service was not yet available in all states. So if you decide to put a security freeze on your credit report, you’ll want to see if it’s offered in the state where you live.
Do you have a security freeze on your credit report?
(As an aside, Mark is the kind of guy who takes great pride in our insanely high credit scores—he watches them like some people watch sports scores. He used to work at Fair Isaac, the people who set up credit scores.) Had invented the score – pretty cool.)
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