Is Freezing Your Credit a Good Idea?

Your credit might be in danger. In fact, technology has created countless ways in which hackers and thieves steal identities and wreak financial havoc on innocent victims. Most people protect themselves by having some form of protection as part of their account.

However, many people choose to freeze their credit as an additional security measure against identity theft. But is freezing your credit a good idea?

There are pros and cons to freezing your credit and understanding the requirements in freezing it will help you decide if it’s the right choice for you.

Why Freeze Your Credit?

A credit freeze has traditionally been offered to account holders who’ve experienced some forum of identify theft of fraud. Recently, the practice has become popular among those who just want to protect themselves in advance.

By freezing your credit, you put your credit report on hold and prevent anyone from gaining access to your credit score or financial history. In fact, not even you can access it without following specific procedures to unfreeze it.

A credit freeze fully protects your reports from access to anyone. Credit inquiries that are commonly performed for loans, purchases, and accounts are also locked out when your credit is frozen.

Benefits of a Freeze

But why would you want to fully lock down your credit? Quite simply, it’s the most secure way to safeguard your credit from financial hackers. It prevents would-be thieves from accessing the most valuable information you have about your money.

If you use a service that monitors your credit, chances are you’ll only find out that you’ve been a victim of identity theft after it’s already occurred. However, by freezing your credit, you proactively prevent any attack on your finances.

What to Watch Out For

Freezing your credit also has some drawbacks that you should consider. It can be an inconvenient way to protect your credit given the difficulty of allowing anyone to access your credit.

So if you want to apply for a loan, rental, or make any purchase that requires a credit check, you’ll have to plan in advance in order to allow the lenders access.

This also requires you to go through specific procedures, which can take time and cost money. There is a fee involved in unlocking your credit, as well as the need to provide a special pin number that you’ve established beforehand.

The cost of unfreezing your credit will vary depending on your local requirements. Different lenders use specific credit bureaus. You may need to unlock your credit with all of them if a lender requires it.

However, if you’re freezing your credit with a help of a mortgage broker due to identify theft, then the fees will not be required. In all other cases, you will likely need to pay for any changes to the status of your credit freeze.

Most people aren’t aware of the frequency with which lenders and other parties perform credit inquires. So make sure that you understand which ones do, in order to prevent the inconvenience and cost of freezing your credit repeatedly.

The following are just some examples of when someone might require access to credit:

• Mortgage
• Insurance
• Credit
• Loan
• Job application
• Cell phone service
• Home utilities
• Online transactions

In order to protect your credit from identity thieves, there’s no better way than freezing it. It prevents access to your credit score and protects your most valuable information.

Although there are some drawbacks with respect to the fees and inconvenience of freezing your credit, the benefits can outweigh them with the full protection it provides and the peace of mind you’ll have around your personal finances.

Venetia Rose has been a freelance writer and blogger. She loves to share and keep herself updated with the latest tips in mortgage and financial consulting. Her interests are cooking, photography, craft and painting. Follow her on Face book https://www.facebook.com/laksh.venetia

How Credit Makes the World go Round

Wipe our Debt (Photo credit: Images_of_Money)

Way back before everyone carried little plastic cards in their wallets instead of cash, the saying was money makes the world go around; not so anymore. You and I are not the only ones who seemed to be enslaved by credit. The biggest user of debt is the US Government itself.

How it Works

Just about everybody is aware that our country is trillions of dollars in debt, but not everyone knows how our government keeps functioning under that debt load. Creating more money is not the answer. If our government creates too much money inflation runs rampant. Instead of paying four dollars at the market for a gallon of milk you end up paying 24 dollars instead. Our government keeps working because of their ability to borrow from other countries, primarily China and Japan. 

If not for the trillions of dollars borrowed from these two countries our country would indeed come to a complete halt. We borrow money by issuing US Treasury notes and bonds. China, Japan, and other countries buy these debt instruments for the interest we pay them every few months. When the bonds and notes mature they’re either rolled over into new Treasuries or we pay the principle amount back in cash. Most Treasury Securities mature every 5, 10, 20, or 30 years. In most cases our government strives to roll the debt over into new long term debt so they don’t have to come up with the cash to pay out.

The Cost of Bad Credit

Most people now days are familiar with their credit score and how it impacts your ability to borrow and the interest rate they receive. If you have poor credit the amount you are able to borrow suffers, and the interest rate you can borrow at rises. The same goes for our country. For many decades our countries credit rating has been the very best; AAA. That makes the US just about the safest country in the world to borrow from. Due to our current economic problems our country’s credit rating has suffered. 

Standard and Poor’s, one of the primary credit rating agencies in the world downgraded the United States debt from AAA to AA with a poor outlook. They have since changed the outlook to stable but have kept their rating at AA. So what does that mean for our government? In order to attract enough investors (like China and Japan) our government has to be willing to pay a higher interest rate due to the increased risk of borrowing from a country in financial and economic turmoil.

Just like the average citizen, as their credit score improves or disproves, the interest rate they are able to borrow at rises or falls. The amount of money you can borrow will also go up or down depending on your credit score.

What if You Can’t Borrow

If your credit score falls too low you lose the ability to borrow money at any rate because the risk is considered to be too great. If you can’t borrow what do you do when there is a financial emergency? Fortunately for most people there are finance companies that give payday loans, personal loans, and car title loans, to name a few. Those are all high interest rate ways to borrow money no matter how bad your credit may be. 

Unfortunately for our government it’s not so easy. It is vital to our country’s economy that our government is able to borrow what it needs to keep functioning and hopefully one day someone will come up with a way to significantly reduce our country’s debt.

Smith is a professional blogger that provides financial information on savings and loans. He writes for InstaLoan.com, a leading title loan lender.

How to Protect Your Credit Standing

A credit card is a payment card issued to users as a system of payment. It allows the cardholder to pay for goods and services based on the holder's promise to pay for them. The issuer of the card creates a revolving account and grants a line of credit to theconsumer . The modern credit card was the successor of a variety of merchant credit schemes 

If we talk about a couple of investment services, now it’s time to talk credit scores! Your credit score is a measure of your financial stability and a key component to approve your loan. So, naturally, we have to keep track of our score. So Credit Sesame is one of the brand names that are designed for credit monitoring. This site actually lets you monitor your credit score for free.

Credit Sesame uses complex algorithms to give you a gauge of your overall credit worthiness in their own, very unique credit score. Although it is not an F.I.C.O. score, it’s still worth tracking. Also, your score is updated every month for monthly tracking of your progress.

Credit Sesame is a free credit score and credit monitoring provider. Not the type of free that only lasts for a week or two but, free for life. Credit Sesame was created in 2010 as a free tool for consumers to monitor their credit reports. They provide various tools that allow you to track loans, payments, credit scores and more and, they never ask you for a credit card!

Credit Sesame Review

Credit Sesame is 100% free, they provide a way to see how much money you owe to whom and great finance management tools and you can get credit score update per month. Credit score provided is not the credit score that you’re looking for. There is a difference between the F.I.C.O. score and any score calculated by anyone else. Credit Sesamedoes their own calculations.

Credit Sesame is becoming so popular with monthly monitoring tools; you can watch your report for security and growth. It’s always good to keep track of your loans. If you haven’t done so in a while, you may be surprised when you open your Credit Sesame account. Their debt and loan analysis tool can help you to prioritize your debts and get them paid off faster!

Credit Sesame has tools that help you save money by reducing payments on loans. You can even customize the alerts so that you get an email when it’s time to save!

When you get to the website ModestMoney.com, you need to give them your social security number and answer a few security questions. Once you’ve answered the security questions, you will be taken to your dashboard which is very user friendly.

My Overall Thoughts about Credit Sesame Review on ModestMoney.com is that it is a great company that has come up with a great product. It provides us a platform that makes the lenders pays for your service through advertisement. The tools provided by Credit Sesame have helped consumers to take control of their financial stability and can definitely help you.