As a part of the process I laid out for myself to get organized before going through my mortgage renewal, I wanted to take a look at my credit report so that I would be able to make sure that there weren’t any errors on it. It is something that a lot of personal finance bloggers recommend doing at least once a year, and honestly, I hadn’t looked at my credit report since I signed up for some 1 month promotion for fraud protection (you know the deals I’m talking about… one month free, and they send you this crazy in-depth report on your credit, with your credit score, but if you don’t remember to cancel the trial, it’ll cost you $X every month… )
Anyway, I managed to get out of that without paying anything, but that was years and years ago… And since then I have had different credit cards, moved a couple times… Got married… Things have changed, so it is good to take a look and make sure that there isn’t anything fishy on the report. I don’t foresee any issues getting approved for a new mortgage, but we are looking to re-finance and pay for some of our major home renos using the equity in our property.
I know, I know… I am getting scowls from all sort of places in the personal finance community for saying that, but with interest rates so low, and with us really wanting to have the house finished up so we can enjoy it before we are too old to enjoy it, we will be borrowing to invest in our home, while still attempting to catch up on our retirement contributions. The interest rates make sense, so we are going for it.
So, how do you get your credit report? I have no idea for any one not in Canada, sorry, but in Canada there are two credit agencies that you can get your reports from: Equifax and Transunion.
The websites don’t make it easy to find the free credit report, because they want you to pay for their services… but hopefully I can just link them directly here:
These are the forms you have to fill out, and then mail in with copies of your ID so that they can then send you your reports.
I did it, and it was surprisingly fast to get them back… I’m not going to share the content of my reports obviously (that is personal information that shouldn’t be published on my blog), but I can say that I went through the reports and everything looked normal, good and there was nothing that I didn’t recognize as myself.
My husband delayed a bit on getting his forms filled out, but we sent those out not too long ago. We haven’t received anything back yet, but hopefully soon… We will review them when we get them and make sure that everything is normal, but we are moving forward without reviewing his in detail because we are running out of time.
Do you review your credit report regularly? Have you ever found any issues with it?
All-Round Better Me 
I almost never check my report. Although one or two of my credit cards sends me my credit score every month. So I suppose if something was getting really crazy it might kill my number and that would give me a heads up. We are considering doing a refi on one of our houses. I really hate paperwork. But it could save us $40k, so I should probably fight the urge to be lazy.
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If the math works out in your favour for a refinance, I would definitely battle thru the paperwork. I found my credit report kind of interesting because it has so much information about me… I didn’t get my actual credit score though…
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