Yet more records get lost by businesses this year. Some closer to home for me than others. So just to be safe I decided to track down my Fed guaranteed annual credit report. Here is all you have to do if you are a USA resident. If you go to any site but this one they could be selling you a service. This is the site the agencies setup in response to the Federal law to provide the annual free report. If you do not want to check it online you can request it via phone or mail.
Make sure your antivirus, antispyware is up to date and run a scan. Just to check for any obvious spyware on your machine. I would not do this from a public hotspot either.
Go To https://www.annualcreditreport.com/
Pick all three credit agencies during the process.
Make sure you don’t pick the part to get your credit score, just the report please and thank you.
I would not give them my email either, sure they will mail you to remind you next year to check it again but then they will likely nag you with other stuff too.
Once you finish the process of filling out various sensitive bits of information to confirm your identity it will give you a nice summary.
Save it in a safe place preferably encrypt it in case you need it later. Personally I printed to PDF and then encrypted the file with blowfish encryption. Windows users can use the latest winzip for a nice level of encryption.
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on Saturday, January 19th, 2008 at 11:55 am and is filed under FiT Tips, George Starcher.
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January 19th, 2008 at 3:53 pm
You are so right that getting your free yearly credit report is a good idea. I can’t tell you how many women I’ve advised that don’t have any idea it’s available to them either. How would you know if there is misinformation if you don’t check it out??
January 21st, 2008 at 1:58 am
Somewhat off topic, but why blowfish as opposed to say, AES?
My 2 cents, 7-zip supports AES-256 encryption in it’s .7z file format. And 7-zip is free and open source w/ no strings attached.
January 21st, 2008 at 4:14 pm
Blowfish in my case just because the tool I used didn’t have AES but blowfish. Nothing wrong with it at all. 7zip is good. I forgot about it since I haven’t kept up to speed on windows apps.