Free Credit Report from Experian
April 22, 2010
Experian is offering a free credit report for 30 days to American Express cardholders. I logged into my credit card account and requested my credit score after I got an email about it this week. I hadn’t checked my credit report in some time and was pleased to see it was still healthy.
American Express partnered with Experian to offer the credit reports so you don’t have access to your Equifax and Transunion reports but just getting the Experian one for free was nice.
Credit Report Access
As I mentioned above, you have to login to your American Express account first to get the offer and then you’re taken to the Experian Direct website where you enter in the standard information needed for a credit report: name, adddress, email, social security number, phone number, and your year of birth.
Once you’ve submitted that info you create a login so you can come back later and access your credit report. Then you have to agree to the terms and conditions of the offer, I read through them to make sure there was no fee for the report and here’s a summary of what I read.
Credit Report Terms & Conditions
The free credit report is available for 30 days and you can’t enroll more than once in a 12 month period. Experian is the credit reporting agency providing the PLUS credit score and you’re giving them permission under the Federal Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) to obtain the information from your personal credit profile. Then they include some (FCRA) disclosures and let you know you can dispute the information in your credit report if you don’t think it’s accurate.
Then the last step is answering two challenge questions to verify your identity, mine were about a street I used to live on and an auto loan from a few years back. Then you’re taken to your credit report, you can see the different sections pictured below.
All posts by Ben Edwards
Great website, thank you! After reading your post I got a free report & found out my boyfriend got 2 credit cards that I had no idea were in my name! Cause of your help I was able to cancel the cards with very low balances!
I would take advantage of this if I was an Amex account holder. For all of you out there who are not, take advantage of a credit monitoring service from either Experian or MyFico. This is especially important if you are trying to watch your credit score go up – I love seeing the alerts when my credit score changes.