Credit

This information is via my friend Shannon:

"Recently the law was changed so that once a year you can get your credit report for free from all three of the huge national credit rating agencies. This is a new thing, as

before you had to pay, and it was a total monopoly. Even if you never plan to buy a home or apply for credit or anything else like that, they have a report on you, and what sucks is often it is wrong, and there may be a bunch of stuff on there that either wasn't by you, or you didn't agree to be billed on, or notes from former landlords etc. This information does not go away, although interestingly, it does reset every seven years. The history remains, but not the black mark that they put on poor people's records. The sucky thing about these records is whether you choose to participate or not, whether you earn it yourself or stay completely off the grid or not, they are keeping track of you, and reporting about you to any business/property owner/gov agency that requests it. The one power we do have is to write a letter of appeal to the reporting agency if there is anything wrong, disputed, not you, or identity thefted, and if the company can not prove your application for the credit or your agreement to be billed, they have to remove it! So I requested mine and found 14 negative accounts, of which 6 were valid. We can empower ourselves by not letting people fuck us over or report stuff on us that isn't true. Credit and consumer stuff is the worst part of society and I thought I had avoided it well, only to find this out, so I have a feeling lots of others out there will find the same thing.

here's the website I used. You can also find all this at the library if you are not into accessing government websites.

http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/credit/repair.shtm