Free Instant Credit Reports - Avoiding the Scams By Harry J. Andersohn At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

I can’t say that I wasn’t surprised when I started to go through all of my e-mail from readers of my consumer-protection blog and I started seeing lots of requests asking me to look into and evaluate sites that offer free instant credit reports.

I never really considered that it would be the kind of topic that my readers wanted to hear about, simply because with all of the sites that are out there, I figured that people would be able to easily find one or two that lived up to their promise.

I guess you could say I was kind of half right. Most people did say that they didn’t have a problem getting to sites that seemed to offer exactly what they were after -- a free credit report, one that could be viewed instantly online, and one that also included a credit score.

But the more we started looking into it, the more we realized that a lot of people could probably easily fall victim to certain clauses if they didn’t truly understand what was that they were doing. So after checking dozens of sites I finally did post my verdict about which site you should use.

We’ll get into that in a second, but first I just wanted to go over very quickly some of the things that have tripped people up in the past.

The first thing you have to understand is that 99% of the legitimate sites out there that offer free instant credit reports are going to bundle that together with a free trial to some sort of credit monitoring or credit protection service.

Very few people ever gripe about this. It just comes with the territory, and it’s not something to be concerned with. In fact, it could actually come in very, very handy for most people who are getting their credit reports. The way these services work is that they continually monitor your report and your credit score and alert you when they change significantly.

This kind of thing can be absolutely invaluable to anyone who is in the process of making a major purchase that’s going to require a loan -- think mortgage, think auto loan, etc.

Now, I’m not going to sit here and say that for your particular situation you actually need this kind of service. It may be that you’re simply one of the people who’s doing the smart thing and checking up on their credit report to make sure there are no errors just as a precaution.

Certainly, if you have no need for this kind of service, all you have to do is simply cancel the subscription within the free trial period (and this is why it’s so, so, so important that you use a reputable company!!!) and you’ll never have any kind of obligation to pay them a dime.

So that pretty much covers the basics of what you need to look for, as well as some of the other things I think you should consider as you evaluate your options.

If you want to save some time, I did promise you above that I would share my favorite choices for free instant credit reports. And I certainly don’t want to leave you hanging.

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