Day 20 Of 30 Days Of Stay-At-Home Personal Finance Wins: Pull, Review, & Freeze Your Credit Report

3 minute read

What if you were able to come out of this time of social distancing and economic crisis with a stronger and healthier financial life? What if you looked at this as an opportunity to take a little bit of your extra time each day to work on your finances?

Since it takes me about 35 minutes to drive to work in the morning and 45 minutes on the way back home, I have an extra 1 hour and 20 minutes of my day that I don’t have to drive while I’m working from home that I can use to accomplish something. This doesn’t even take into consideration all of the networking and social events that would usually take up some of my time throughout the week.

Obviously, your situation is different than mine (and probably a whole lot different if you have kids at home who would otherwise be in daycare), but I’m guessing that we all have at least a little extra time right now that we can dedicate to our personal finances.

It looks like we’re going to continue to practice our social distancing skills at least through April, and now is a great time to work on creating a better financial situation, so I’m giving you 30 days of stay-at-home personal finance wins throughout April.

Unfortunately, I understand that there are many who have (and who will) lose their jobs during this time of uncertainty and objectively will not come out on the other side of this with a stronger financial situation. Hopefully, many of these personal finance wins can help to lessen the blow and make things easier on them. On the other hand, I think that many of these wins are still relevant to those who are fortunate enough to be in a position to not have to worry about their job and their finances to help them build a healthier financial life.

Day 20: Pull, Review, & Freeze Your Credit Report

Following a monitoring schedule and reviewing your credit report is something that you should be doing multiple times each year so that you can review everything that’s being reported on it and help guard against fraud and identity theft.

If someone were to fraudulently open a line of credit in your name, then it would be reported on your credit report and you would be able to catch it during one of your regularly scheduled reviews. However, a lot of damage could be done to your credit in the time in between checking your credit. It’s important to freeze your credit reports so that the credit reporting bureaus won’t give access to your files without the freeze being lifted first, making it harder for someone to do something that could wreak havoc on your credit history.

If you find something that looks off on when reviewing your report you should dig into it immediately and figure out if further action needs to be taken or if it’s just something that you’ve forgotten about. Once you’ve reviewed your report and confirmed that everything looks fine (and you’ve frozen your credit files), you can set a reminder for yourself to do the exercise again in 4 months.

Here’s a more in-depth article explaining how to accomplish these wins: 5 Easy Personal Finance Wins for the New Year