Where to get a free credit report

Financial woes abound during this period of worldly financial turmoil. In addition to this, people across South Africa are being forced to hand back their big, expensive vehicles, with tears in their eyes at their inability to make the next payment. Some have even lost huge sums of money on purchases that have simply become too expensive with the current interest rates.

I’m glad I’m not in that boat, and perhaps it has something to do with knowing my credit status. It’s also quite handy to check up on who’s been checking out your credit status. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who is watching the credit givers, if you will.

If you need to get access to your personal credit report, which the credit bureaux legally have to provide to you at no cost once per year, head over to MyCredit.co.za and register for your Transunion ITC report. Registration there was quick and easy and you get a cool pdf report emailed to you pretty quickly once registration is complete and the report has been ordered. I enjoyed tracing the deliberately confusing trail that I have intricately laid down for anyone who examines my credit situation. After all, they don’t need to know everything perfectly accurately, now do they?

There’s also CreditExpert, who will give you your status as per Experian’s records, but after registering they still wanted a whole lot of that eminently forgeable paperwork they call FICA records, so I have not yet seen the quality of their report.

Have fun. You now have the knowledge to get yourself out of any credit situation you might be stuck in. Oh, and when you’ve fixed that, take a minute and cut up one of those credit cards. It’ll do you a world of good.