Freezing your credit report or not?

Now we have new tool available to protect our identity theft: ability to freeze our credit report. Freezing our credit report can help protect fraud victims. Now consumers have a strong weapon in the form of security freeze, where they will be able to keep theft away from obtaining a credit by our names.

When you freeze your credit report, you will be preventing creditors from checking your credit history that can be one of big drawbacks of freezing your credit report. There are some important things we all need to know before freezing our credit reports:

1. Security freeze is not same as fraud alert


2. You have to freeze your credit report from all three national credit bureaus – Experian, Equifax and TransUnion.


3. Credit reports are frozen at individual level. If you are married, you and your spouse have to separately request for freezing of your credit reports and have to pay fees separately.


4. Think before deciding whether to freeze your credit report or not. The credit bureaus take five business days to freeze your credit report and ten business days to send a confirmation letter with your personal id number and toll free number to lift the freeze on your credit report. You can ask credit bureaus to temporarily lift freeze on your credit report. The credit bureaus take three business days to lift the freeze temporarily. So keep all these things in mind before requesting for the freezing of your credit report.


5. Freezing credit report is not going to affect your credit score any way. But it will stop you from getting instant credit. Although you will have access to your free credit report that you can obtain every 12 months through annualcreditreport.com


6. Freezing of your credit report will not prevent existing creditors from accessing your credit report and will also not affect your ability to use your credit accounts.


7. Security freeze is not the ultimate solution against identity theft.