Financial Smarties: Know Your Credit

In our first Financial Smarties post, we created a list of what we owe.  In the 2nd post, Financial Smarties: Know How Much You Spend, we created a list of what we spend on any given week or month.  Now, the final piece of truly being honest with ourselves financially is checking our credit. 

When it comes to credit, the credit reporting agencies allow one free credit report each year to individuals.  We recommend that you visit AnnualCreditReport.com which is sponsored by the three major reporting agencies, TransUnion, Equifax and Experion.  This is the ONLY source for your free credit report authorized by the federal government.  Other sites may try and sell you other options such as credit monitoring programs or claim to fix your credit.  Or you may fall prey to a site that is trying to steal your information.  Type AnnualCreditReport.com into your browser to visit the site and get started without the worries and hassles of being sold something. A good idea when ordering your free credit reports is to order them one at a time and spread them out over the year - and since there are three agencies, that would mean ordering a new one from a different agency every four months.

Once you have your report, you'll find information on financial institutions and credit card companies to whom you owe money, any late payments you have made, any collection accounts you may have and also an overall score.  All three credit reporting agencies offer information on how to read their reports.  As we have done in our past two posts, just take some time to review this information.  Our goal today is to have a good understanding of our credit and to see if we missed anything on our previous lists of debts.

Congratulations!  You now know who you owe, how much you spend and what your credit looks like.  No matter what, just knowing that information puts you ahead of those who choose to bury their head.  You can't have a good financial outlook if you don't know where you stand - and now you do!