Getting a Free Credit Report Without a Credit Card

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Is there such a thing as a free credit report? Yes! Do I have to give out my credit card for this “free” credit report? No!

Here’s how. With the Fair Credit Reporting Act you have the right to one free credit report each year from Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. So every 12 months a credit report is yours free.

There’s one small issue though. You don’t get to see your score. Every aspect of your credit is given except the actual number. You won’t know if you have 820, 700, or 550 credit score.

How important is the actual number? Not very. In order of importance it’s about fourth on the list below credit accounts, past due payments, court rulings, and other issues in your report. If you are dying to know the actual score you can always pay the $20 to see it. If you want to go that route click here.

You don’t need to enter your credit card information but they will ask a series of questions to verify you are who you say you are. Once you verify the questions you will have full access to your credit score.

To get started visit annualcreditreport.com. For verification on the legitimacy of this offer visit the Federal Trade Commission’s site.

HINT: Space out the time you get your credit report by four months and you can monitor your credit for free. So in April get your free report from Equifax, in August Experian, and in December TransUnion. You’ll be able to catch most things but if you’re overly concerned about your credit score you might consider professional monitoring.

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Ultimate Craigslist Tip to Have Deals Come to You

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The deals on Craigslist are awesome but you have to be quick to get them. Most of the time it would require your fulltime attention to the particular category to find the deal of a lifetime. Not only does that take a lot of time you also might miss things. The deal of a lifetime might be posted in the free section or the garage sale section, where you would never find them. There’s a better way to find great deals.

The easier way to find deals is by using RSS feeds. For those who aren’t familiar with RSS it stands for Real Simple Syndication. RSS feeds are a way for websites to broadcast when a change has been made. When someone on Craigslist posts an item on Craigslist the RSS feed is updated. If you are subscribed to the RSS feed you’ll be notified when that item is posted. The good deals will track you down instead of the other way around.

The two things you’ll need are:
1) An RSS feed reading like Google Reader
2) Search terms

The more specific you can get with the search terms the better your results will be. For example, searching for couch isn’t going to yield good results. You’ll get hundreds of listings for every couch posted. On the other hand, searching for “micro fiber” or “leather couch” will yield more meaningful results.

With that introduction lets get into the nitty-gritty.

Step 1 – Go to your craigslist.org and find your city

Step 2 – Type in your search terms

Step 3 – Copy the RSS link at the bottom of the page

Step 4 – Paste that RSS link into your reader

You will want to add a new feed for every search term (i.e. “micro fiber” “microfiber” “micro couch” ect.)

To have the system work the best try to use keyword search. Even though each page has its own RSS link it wouldn’t be effective to get every item from every category. Good luck with this. I’ve found a lot of great things using this technique.

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