How to Freeze and Unfreeze your Credit
To be clear this does change things that you don’t expect, and is not for those who don’t like to put in a little work in order to maintain a much higher level of security with their financial records.
WHY?!? CREDIT IS LIFE!
First, why on earth would you do this? Freezing credit sounds ominous, but it is really the only way YOU can maintain control of your bureau records. There are many credit “notification” services, but they are only detective and can only tell you when someone else is ALREADY trying to use your credit.
Famously the CEO of Lifeline had his Identity stolen over a dozen times. This is easily understood since credit monitoring is not meant to prevent activity, only to inform when it happens. Freezing does the opposite, it essentially acts as a whitelist for interacting with your records at credit bureaus that you control directly and in-so-doing prevents any attempts from even alerting (if you did happen to have a monitoring service.)
Depending on your state you will have different laws as to what freeze capabilities the credit bureaus must provide legally. But they all tend to implement it the same way (Transunion being the exception.) There’s a form you can fill out, put in personal information including your “Address” your name, your SSN and your DOB.
Note about Addresses: When it comes to your address this will get a little tricky in the future, but for the sake of this document we’ll assume your residences are all in sync with each of the bureaus from the start. This will matter, because after you freeze your credit no creditor can update your address until you either release and do it yourself, or release and ask that the creditor update your address.
In the case where you can get some (less than all) of the agencies to verify your identity it's likely due to some of the data not matching. If you were able to access one of your agency profiles, you can use that agency to perform a multi-bureau credit check. When you do this, you will then have enough information to authorize freezes for the remaining bureaus.
In the case where you can get some (less than all) of the agencies to verify your identity it's likely due to some of the data not matching. If you were able to access one of your agency profiles, you can use that agency to perform a multi-bureau credit check. When you do this, you will then have enough information to authorize freezes for the remaining bureaus.
Each Bureau has a slightly different take on these from a marketing perspective, and until recently didn’t really provide anything beyond the bare minimum capacity for freezing/unfreezing your credit. They’re getting a little better, but it is still seems to be whatever the minimum is required by law.
The Credit Bureaus
There are four credit bureaus in the united states: Experian, Equifax, Transunion and most recently Innovis. They each hold what they consider an authoritative copy of your credit history, open accounts, and any individual report on those accounts. They support the creditors by providing paid access to your credit history (through Soft and Hard hits: see Credit Karma’s explanation here.)
A freeze is actually the only hard action you can perform yourself to create a hard barrier for your credit bureau data from questionable creditors, and fraudsters. Each bureau has their own form for this, Transunion seems to be the best about trying to provide a useable customer experience (to upsell their monitoring services.)
Bureau Name
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Freeze URL
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Equifax
| |
Experian
| |
Transunion
| |
Innovis
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If you have any open accounts that are being tracked by a bureau, those creditors are the only ones who can perform any action (update) to your account, but only on the existing accounts the creditor had on file at the time of the freeze. So this isn’t a cure-all, or meant to be a way to protect yourself against real dings against your credit, only those you didn’t authorize.
Ok I’ve frozen it, now what?
Woah! Hang on there, before you begin make sure you’ve taken down the address at the time you put in the freeze and put it somewhere you can find it later. Once you’ve frozen your credit, nobody can update the address shown as your residence. It’s a good idea to keep a copy so you can reference it when you need to release your credit freeze, they will ask for it again.
Also, it should be a real address (some of the bureaus will only mail a PIN to unlock, and make it rather challenging to unlock if you didn’t receive that letter.)
Caveat: make sure you don’t need to perform any credit related actions for the next two weeks (getting a loan, buying new insurance policies, renting a new place, buying/renting a car, getting new utility service, getting a new cell phone plan) because you’ll be waiting for the PINs in order to unlock your credit the first time.
Once you receive the pins, you should put them somewhere safe and accessible for when you need to allow others to access your data. Using a password manager is a great way to store all of this information (Freeze Address and Freeze Pin.)
I’ve gotta unfreeze it, like right away!!
Not a problem! You can do this the same way you enabled the freeze, only you don’t need to wait for any letter. It can take less than 10 minutes to unfreeze all four bureaus if you’ve prepared your information as recommended before.
Note: Make sure to ask the creditor (agent querying your credit) which agency they use, if they know which it can save you time and 20-30 dollars depending on your state. If they only use one, you can simply unfreeze that bureau and leave the others alone.
When you want to unfreeze your credit, depending on the state listed in your Freeze Address, you will either have to pay a small fee (I believe the maximum is 20 dollars) or it may be free. Once you’ve input the data the bureau needs to authenticate you (address, ssn, dob) you can now select the mode of the lift.
You can choose to lift it indefinitely which essentially removes your freeze. You can choose to release it for a set time period, after which time the freeze returns (most bureaus use the temporary mode for this behavior) or you can choose to generate and provide a pin/password that a specific creditor can use to query your credit.
While it is beneficial to start with a pin/password, many folks who are executing credit screening don’t have access (due to using a third party service) or have no idea how (it’s not very popular, yet) to use a PIN to access an individual’s credit history. In those cases, opening all bureaus and setting the temporary window to the time they’ll be querying is your best bet.
What does this mean long term?
If you optimize your unfreezing for only those bureaus actually being queried, ONLY the bureaus that were used to provide hard hits against will have your accounts on record, they will also all only get your “address” information during those brief periods of unfreezing, so it is possible for the addresses to get out of sync (why you need to keep track of them.)
It’s recommended to manually update your bureau addresses during your unfreezes if you want to maintain a single address, it makes it a whole lot easier.
