1. It is free at www.AnnualCreditReport.com.  Make sure you use this site and not the sites you see on TV with the catchy jingles.  Those sites are not free even though “free” is usually in their names.  This central site allows you to request a free report once every twelve months from each of the national reporting companies: Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion.
2. You can keep current by pulling a different reporting company every four months.  You get one free report from each of the three national reporting companies every twelve months so pull your Equifax this time, Experian the beginning of May, and TransUnion in September (3 companies over 12 months equals one every four months).
3. It only takes about ten minutes to do.
4. Spot identity theft early without paying fees to monitoring companies.  When you request the free reports, the reporting company may try to sell you monitoring service or credit scores.  I generally purchase my credit score once per year (cost of about $7.00) but you could use sites like www.creditkarma.com instead (beware of the non-stop sales pitches though).
5. Verify the accuracy of your credit report by proactively spotting errors and cleaning up old accounts.  You should review the report in detail and contact the reporting company with any errors.  This is also a good time to scan the report for old accounts or accounts you no longer use.  You will be surprised by the ghost accounts still living out there in the spooky credit universe.

Pulling your credit every four months is a great habit to establish (not a ton of fun but not real difficult or time-consuming either).  In a future blog post, I’ll discuss freezing your credit to further protect yourself against identity theft.