Have you ever heard of the placing a security or credit freeze on your credit report?
Here’s what consumer advocate Clark Howard says: “Credit freezes are one of the most effective tools 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 lift the security freezes from our credit reports to allow a ‘third party’ in this case a prospective landlord, to take a look at our credit. We were renting new office space and the broker was running the usual credit checks on us both. When we explained that it would take a day before he could run it, as we had to initiate the lift – he seemed a little surprised. In reality, he hadn’t heard of a security freeze.
I’m always a little shocked when I find out how few people place freezes on their credit reports. In general, it’s not expensive. In CA where we live, it costs us $10 to lift the each freeze and we wind up having to lift them maybe once every 3-4 years depending on what we are up to. In the most recent case, we asked which reporting service the broker used, he told us Experian, so we only lifted that one. The cost then, was $20 for both mine and Mark’s.
And yes, it is kind of a pain in the butt – but it’s just administrative kind of pain in the butt stuff. It amounts to one or more phone calls (depending if you have to lift all three) or doing the lift on-line and – in either case you have to know your pin number for each of the credit reporting services, Experian, Equifax and TransUnion. So you have to be somewhat organized in terms of safely storing and being able to find your pin.
A year or so ago, this service was not yet available in all states. So if you decide to place a security freeze on your credit report, you’ll want to check to see if it is offered in the state you live in.
I’d be interested to know – do you have a security freeze on your credit reports?
(As an aside, Mark is the kind of guy who is so super proud of our extremely high credit scores – he watches them like some guys watch sports scores. He used to work at Fair Isaac, the folks who invented the credit score – pretty cool.)
