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Have you ever frozen your credit?


Dirtyhip

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4 minutes ago, bikeman564™ said:

No. I'd never freeze my own credit.

Why not.  What do you see as a problem?

8 minutes ago, pedalphile said:

I’ve never had credit.

Everyone has a score.  One that never took credit would have a very low or non existent score.  Credit fraud is rampant with our info being leaked to evil doers.

If one wishes to rent forever, maybe having no credit would work out best in that situation.

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3 minutes ago, bikeman564™ said:

knock on wood, never had an issue thus far. When you freeze, does it only prevent new accounts being open? Is it easy to unfreeze? Serious questions, I don't know.

From what I understand, it does not create any issue with existing accounts.  You have to pay a nominal free (less than 10), and you are given a pin that will allow you to unfreeze so you can apply for a loan.  Your unfreeze can be permanent or for a given period of time.  Once you secure new loans, you can freeze it again.

It provides us with protection from fraudulent activity while it is frozen.  

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Most commentators suggest it's a good thing to do to protect from identity fraud, but I haven't done it yet.  They just changed the law so now it's free to freeze and unfreeze, so you may see some articles about it in the news currently. 

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Here's an article in the NY Times discussing this topic, including the change in law to make it free.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/14/your-money/credit-freeze-free.html

While highly recommended by most security experts, the article mentions some of the reasons people hesitate to do it:

 

Quote

But the freeze process is not as easy as it could be, said Mike Litt, consumer campaign director for U.S. PIRG, the consumer advocacy group. He would prefer credit files to be “frozen” by default, and thawed on request. As it stands, consumers must place freezes separately at all three bureaus, and keep track of three PINs.

And because it’s not always possible to know in advance what credit bureau a lender will use, consumers typically must lift the freezes at all three bureaus when they want to apply for new credit.

I have signed up for a monitoring through a credit card I have, and they send me a notice each month if there is any change in my credit reports.  That's a bit like locking the gate after the horse escapes, but at least it would give me relatively prompt notice if something is wrong.

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I froze mine. With all the data breaches all of your information is for sale on the dark web. The Equifax breach exposed credit file information on 143 million persons, mine is probably among them. Names, addresses, DOB, SSN, employment, including income data, loan balances with available credit amounts. Too risky not to shut off the spigot. It is inconvenient to have to unfreeze and freeze when I want to borrow. but I'd hate to have to go through a case of identity theft or proving that I didn't sign up for credit or a bank account somewhere. 

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58 minutes ago, Dirtyhip said:

Why not.  What do you see as a problem?

Everyone has a score.  One that never took credit would have a very low or non existent score.  Credit fraud is rampant with our info being leaked to evil doers.

If one wishes to rent forever, maybe having no credit would work out best in that situation.

Why? I have the funds for the stuff I buy, I don’t have to see it as a problem, do I, to choose not to borrow funds I do not need?

Re everyone has a score, I know it, to my cost; since I’ve never borrowed I don’t have a positive score, I have no record of repayments to look at when rating a risk for loans or credit, I discovered this when buying from Amazon who tempted me with savings on that purchase if I took out their credit card, so I filled in all their tedious probing questions, and had to wait 24 hours to make the purchase while they checked me out, and found me wanting, so all that resulted was a day’s delay getting my stuff.

Yes, I am planning renting this gaff for ever, I like it here, it suits me well.

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51 minutes ago, ChrisL said:

Some good info I'll need to look in to.  We put hard caps on our credit limits as we don't need $30K in available credit on our card but haven't froze it. 

What's a hard cap?  We essentially have an assortment of credit cards and our mortgage.  The CCs are whatever random azz limit they gave us at the time, and periodically we get a notice the limit increased.  I haven't seen a "simple" way to say to any of them that say a $15k max is all we want.  Maybe you can do that by calling them and telling them to adjust the limit to whatever you'd rather have? Or is it via some other process.

We have credit monitoring due to some breach a few years ago, and the only notices I get are when a sex offender moves into my neighborhood. I am not sure why that is part of the service, but whatever.  I think freezing credit is probably the SMARTEST option currently available, and need to get on it now that it seems free/almost free.

I gotta say it is bullshit that it would ever be a cost, since they aren't serving ME, but rather serving and getting paid by their customers - credit card companies, mortgage, financial service, demographics, etc.. - by selling our info. They should be paying all of us to use (and mishandle) our info, but that ain't gonna happen :(

Tom

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44 minutes ago, Razors Edge said:

What's a hard cap?  We essentially have an assortment of credit cards and our mortgage.  The CCs are whatever random azz limit they gave us at the time, and periodically we get a notice the limit increased.  I haven't seen a "simple" way to say to any of them that say a $15k max is all we want.  Maybe you can do that by calling them and telling them to adjust the limit to whatever you'd rather have? Or is it via some other process.

We have credit monitoring due to some breach a few years ago, and the only notices I get are when a sex offender moves into my neighborhood. I am not sure why that is part of the service, but whatever.  I think freezing credit is probably the SMARTEST option currently available, and need to get on it now that it seems free/almost free.

I gotta say it is bullshit that it would ever be a cost, since they aren't serving ME, but rather serving and getting paid by their customers - credit card companies, mortgage, financial service, demographics, etc.. - by selling our info. They should be paying all of us to use (and mishandle) our info, but that ain't gonna happen :(

Tom

Maybe "hard cap" was a bad term but we just lowered our available credit line to $10K even though the bank wants to give us much more.  There is no need for us to have so much available credit and would prevent a large fraudulent purchase.  

Cap One was reluctant to do this for us but did. We closed out that account and our credit union was happy to adjust the credit limit down.

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3 hours ago, pedalphile said:

Why? I have the funds for the stuff I buy, I don’t have to see it as a problem, do I, to choose not to borrow funds I do not need?

Re everyone has a score, I know it, to my cost; since I’ve never borrowed I don’t have a positive score, I have no record of repayments to look at when rating a risk for loans or credit, I discovered this when buying from Amazon who tempted me with savings on that purchase if I took out their credit card, so I filled in all their tedious probing questions, and had to wait 24 hours to make the purchase while they checked me out, and found me wanting, so all that resulted was a day’s delay getting my stuff.

Yes, I am planning renting this gaff for ever, I like it here, it suits me well.

This scenario is great for you, if it suits you.  I personally don't love the idea of renting forever.  Especially so, since expenses are a great factor in wanting to retire.  Rents just go up and up and up.

Here, your credit rating seems to affect things like the price you will pay for auto insurance.  You probably live without a car, and that's great.  I like to travel to other places and use an auto to do that.  We worked quite hard to get a score as high as ours.  We can easily obtain credit, if we wish.  Personally, I don't want to take on any more debt for the remainder of my life.  We will see.

56 minutes ago, Razors Edge said:

What's a hard cap?  We essentially have an assortment of credit cards and our mortgage.  The CCs are whatever random azz limit they gave us at the time, and periodically we get a notice the limit increased.  I haven't seen a "simple" way to say to any of them that say a $15k max is all we want.  Maybe you can do that by calling them and telling them to adjust the limit to whatever you'd rather have? Or is it via some other process.

We have credit monitoring due to some breach a few years ago, and the only notices I get are when a sex offender moves into my neighborhood. I am not sure why that is part of the service, but whatever.  I think freezing credit is probably the SMARTEST option currently available, and need to get on it now that it seems free/almost free.

I gotta say it is bullshit that it would ever be a cost, since they aren't serving ME, but rather serving and getting paid by their customers - credit card companies, mortgage, financial service, demographics, etc.. - by selling our info. They should be paying all of us to use (and mishandle) our info, but that ain't gonna happen :(

Tom

The whole thing is a mess and it is slanted towards the creditors aka:  banks.  How many times have we heard of a breach in our data?   The cost has been waived now for freezing, I guess.  I am going to look into a freeze for our credit.  If we need to unlock it, we can do that.  It gives me comfort knowing that I have emergency funds to access. 

I feel so fortunate that we were able to work hard enough that now those bastard banks pay us.  

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...I froze mine with all the major agencies right around the time of the Equifax thingy.  Took about a day to figure them all out, and at the time, a couple of them were trying to charge for it, but gave up in a hurry.  I don't plan on buying any more houses, we pay cash for cars, pretty much, and the one Visa account I have with the Credit Union works for everything I need to buy.

 

I've never tried to unfreeze any of them, and there are some secret passwords or some such they gave me at the time, which I have in a folder somewhere.  But by and large I no longer needed to borrow money in my circumstances, and when you're as old as me, it's often considered inadvisable for the lenders anyway.  I don't know how much of a hassle it is to unfreeze those reporting services, but I've been involved in several data breaches, and my credit dard has been subject to fraudulent activity at least three times over the past  few years,  so it just made sense for me.

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I haven't. i'm afraid one of the credit reporting agencies is gonna get hacked.....oh, wait

we are not big credit users. I should do it. Once or twice a year we purchase a truck and take out a loan. I currently have $250k out in loans. 3 loans roll off next year. That will help. Should get it down to $150k or less. I use those loans as a reason not to do it. Now that the freeze/unfreeze is free i should just do it. Also i am afraid of losing the PIN's

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