Public Service Announcement: Freezing Your Credit Report is Easy & Free. Do it.

There's another thread regarding the recent Equifax Data Breach Settlement which reminds me of a similar topic. I thought everyone could benefit from but I didn't want to derail that thread so I decided this was worthy of it's own topic.

Freezing your credit report will prevent anyone from viewing your credit history or pulling a report. This doesn't keep your credit score from going up or down but it prevents others from viewing it. This is critical for opening new lines of credit or account making it virtually impossible for someone to steal your identity. They would need to unfreeze your credit which requires a lot of next-level info that likely only you have. That's the whole point.

If you're doing your part to keep from getting into debt you won't need this wide-open anyway. In the rare instance in which you need to use it you can either unfreeze temporarily or entirely for free.

It's free to freeze your credit with all three bureaus: Equifax, Experian & TransUnion.

One of the few good things the federal government has done is to require each of the three to freeze your credit within 24 hours (if done online, 3 days if done via snail mail) and unfreeze within 1 hour upon your request. Take advantage of this. It takes a few minutes to do all three and will bring a significant amount of peace of mind for no money at all. Great ROI.


1) Equifax
https://www.equifax.com/personal/cre...port-services/
Find the "freeze" option and click "Get Started" then follow prompts to create an account and activate credit freeze.


2) Experian
https://www.experian.com/help/
Find the "freeze" option & then follow prompts to create an account and activate credit freeze.


3) TransUnion
https://www.transunion.com/credit-freeze
Find "Freeze my Credit" option & then follow prompts to create an account and activate credit freeze.

Just make sure to do the "freeze" option as this is free. They may try to convince you to "Lock" or "Monitor" your credit report but those will be pay services. Once you Freeze it though the value in monitoring goes down substantially.

I did this. Then needed to unfreeze it. 3 weeks and multiple phone calls a day for the last two weeks for them to loose my request repeatedly. If you have to unfreeze it, allow 2 months for them to do so.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Wulf202

I did this. Then needed to unfreeze it. 3 weeks and multiple phone calls a day for the last two weeks for them to loose my request repeatedly. If you have to unfreeze it, allow 2 months for them to do so.

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How long ago was that? They've made some changes and they're required by Federal law to grant the un-freeze within one-hour of requesting it online.

Great info, thanks!

Good post Jer.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Wulf202

I did this. Then needed to unfreeze it. 3 weeks and multiple phone calls a day for the last two weeks for them to loose my request repeatedly. If you have to unfreeze it, allow 2 months for them to do so.

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Never had that happen. Lock/Unlock PIN and/or account login and done.

FYI, I pay Trans monthly for monitoring and can lock/unlock (freeze) either Trans or Equifax from my account. I assume it's the same with Trans if you pay for Equifax services. I can login to Experian to unfreeze/freeze at will. That said, the last time I needed an unfreeze was 18 months ago for a refi. At that time, I needed my "lock/unlock" PINs that were created the first time I did it. Not sure if that's still the process. I also seem to recall that you could specify a time frame to keep it unlocked (at least on Experian) and it would automatically lock again after that. Gives you time if you're shopping rates, etc. or waiting for underwriters to do a hard pull.

We did this a few years ago when someone in our HR org got phished and provided a boatload of personal data to some person (or group) posing as an executive needing the data for beneftis discussions or some crap like that. Company offered credit monitoring to employees, but a bunch of us just decided to freeze our credit. Has never been an issue . . . we never take out new credit anyway. I suppose at some point I may want/need to and I'll have to go through the process to un-freeze.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Jer

How long ago was that? They've made some changes and they're required by Federal law to grant the un-freeze within one-hour of requesting it online.

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June of 2017.
Equifax

The other two were fine

Will be doing this soonish. Was holding off with the house sale/potential for buying.

Don't lose your pin to unlock or you will have months of phone calls and letters proving you are you.

wife and I put a freeze on ours a few years ago and then in '17 we went to buy her a new car only to be reminded then that we had put a freeze on, so while in the car dealership we went through the steps to unlock our credit and it didn't take but maybe 15 minutes.

Since then and with no plans of large purchases in the near future, we have put a freeze back on with each agency.