All good things must come to an end I suppose. Well, even when the good thing came from a bad thing. I’m talking about Equifax’s huge gaff. You remember, the one where they accidentally forgot to reveal that like everyone on Earth had their vital information stolen? Yeah, that gaff. Well when they went about trying to clean things up, something funny happened. At first, they actually charged people to watch out for their credit when they were the ones who put it at risk in the first place.
Well that’s all water under the bridge now but here’s the thing, your free coverage from Equifax is about to run out. According to CNBC, Equifax’s free protection offer ends on January 31st. After that, you’re on the hook for payment. The cost to freeze your report at each of the three large credit bureaus is $2 to $10 depending on the bureau. Of course, you should be keeping pretty good tabs on your own credit anyway. It’s way to easy nowadays for thieves to come in and get your information. Even when you thought it was all safe with the credit bureau.
Speaking on the news, Mike Litt, Consumer Campaign Director at the consumer advocacy group US PIRG said, “Whether your information was stolen in the Equifax breach or not, the best thing you can do is get credit freezes at all three. You’ll have peace of mind and you could save yourself the time and stress of dealing with fraudulent debt on your credit reports.”
Make sure you get connected with a credit monitoring service as its basically a necessity now. I wonder what’s going to be the next big breach we hear about. If the credit bureaus aren’t safe anymore than how do we know anything is safe? Something like 145 million of us were affected by this breach. That’s pretty much everybody in the US.