Credit Freezing

Just figures; all the frugal sites i read are talking about freezing lovely produce from their gardens - while I'm  freezing my credit report...

Per my Mindful Chickens of just this morning - I just froze two credit reports and fraud alerted the third. There are apparently two smaller credit reporting agencies I never heard of before, so I’m doing nothing about them at this time.

I suggest you read this first. Krebs is a well-respected guy; I heard him interviewed on an NPR show a while back. Read “about the author” section for more credentials.  

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/09/the-equifax-breach-what-you-should-know/

Freezing the credit reports was not NEARLY as hard as I expected it to be.  If you use the links in Krebs’ article, it takes you directly to the Security Freeze pages of each of the websites. 

Equifax did not charge me to install the freeze.  Experion and TransUnion charge $10 each. Which means in a marriage of two people, you will pay $10 for EACH freeze, which is $40. Unless you have a police report on credit fraud against your account. You can read more about it in the article.

Last night when we noticed the mysterious $50 charges and repayments in our credit bill – Len sent an email to our credit account company.

WHILE I was putting the credit freeze on TransUnion – our credit company card cancelled our card so I could not charge the $10 fee to it. Isn’t life simple? I called TransUnion, the guy said to put a free 90-day fraud alert on it. Then when we get the new credit card, we can pay the fee to get the freeze then.

We won’t freeze Len’s credit reports until we get our new cards.

All I want to clearly say here is – this was not hard.  It took less than an hour to do the three reporting agencies. They do ask some security questions, but I could answer them.

I now have pin numbers that I will put in our regular safe place. If we want to buy something big (like a car or open a new credit card) with credit we will have to call (or email) the reporting agencies, give them the pin, and they will give reports to whomever we designate.  But since we are at a very stable and boring place in our financial lives (Praise Be) we probably won’t do this much or ever.  In the meantime we don’t have to worry that our credit is living a Pulp Fiction life without us.