"Tracking Your Score is About to Get Easier" (article from the "LA Times" 11/28/04)

By Kenneth R. Harney

A major new credit resource for home buyers and other consumers is set to go live on December 1, 2004- www.annualcreditreport.com.
Not only will it provide congressionally mandated free credit reports for millions of Americans- one per year from each of the three national credit bureaus- but the site will offer extensive tools to help you monitor your credit files and guard against identity theft.
Though designed to be most efficient as on online resource, AnnualCreditReport.com also will be accessible by toll-free telephone at (877) 322-8228, and by regular mail (Box 105281, Atlanta, GA 30348-5281).
Consumers anywhere should be able to visit AnnualCreditReport.com starting Dec 1, but eligibility for free annual credit reports will be phased in over the next 10 months on a schedule that begins in the Western region, which includes California, and rolls out to the East Coast.
A provision of the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act, passed by Congress last year, requires the three national credit bureaus to design and operate a centralized resource from which consumers can obtain a free copy of each of their bureau reports once every 12 months.
Equifax, Experian and TransUnion, the three big private credit firms, each receive billions of bits of data on more than 200 billion consumers ever year from banks, credit card companies, department stores, collection agencies and local governments. The bureaus’ electronic files frequently contain different data- some creditors report to one or two bureaus, some report to none- which is why Congress mandated free reports to each.
Visitors to AnnualCreditReport.com will first be asked to identify the state where they live. Between now and the final rollout date of Sept. 1, 2005, for the eastern Seaboard states, only residents of eligible states will be able to proceed to the second step of ordering their free reports.
Temporarily ineligible consumers will be able to link to each of the credit bureaus’ own websites and order their reports for a fee- generally around $9.95 per report.
Visitors eligible for free reports Dec 1- an estimated 70 million consumers- will be asked to enter key personal identifying information- all kept secure by a range of anti-hacker technology- including date of birth and Social Security Number. Since some of the authentication questions will be highly specific, such as the name of your mortgage company or the amount of your monthly mortgage payment, the three bureaus strongly recommend that you have your personal financial documents handy when you visit the site. They emphasize, however, that the authentication procedures will never require you to divulge credit card or bank account numbers.
The site will not require ordering all three bureau reports simultaneously. Stretching out your right over a period of months might be useful for anyone who anticipates significant financial events during the year ahead.
Say, for example, that you plan to buy a house early in 2005 and you are eligible for a free report Dec. 1. You could order your Experian free credit report now and check for any errors or omissions, well in advance of applying for a mortgage. Say that you also expect to start a new business next year. You could order your free TransUnion report in advance of your loan application, again checking for errors or omissions that could affect your borrowing costs. Finally, you could order your free Equifax report next fall and start the whole process over again next December.
Once you’ve selected a bureau report, AnnualCreditReport.com will zip you to that bureau’s domain, where you should get your file within a minute or two. The bureau also will let you order your credit score, plus an array of other proprietary credit tools and services. For example, only Equifax will sell FICO scores, which are used by mortgage lenders to evaluate your application for a loan. The cost will be $6.95 per Fico score. TransUnion and Experian will sell their own non-FICO scores for around $4 each.
Experian will offer a new “Triple Alert” credit monitoring system that, for $4.95 a month, will notify consumers of every “ping.”- every inquiry or file change, however minor- in each of their three online bureau credit files. The alerts will come in the form of cell phone text messages and e-mails and will direct consumers to check their customized credit pages at an Experian site to see what changes occurred.

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