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How to freeze your credit

by | Blog

A generic blue credit card is seen in a snowstorm with icicles in a 3-d illustration about putting a credit freeze on a credit report. Bold Vision Financial

Identity theft is on the rise, and having dealt with it personally a few years back, I can assure you it is a royal pain in the arse, a time suck, an administrative nightmare, a massive game of whack-a-mole, and to be avoided if at all possible.  The best way to avoid it is to freeze your credit (also known as a security freeze). This is kind of a pain to do, but worth it. Credit freezes are required by law to be free.  Credit locks are paid services from the credit bureaus, and we at BVF are not fans of paying for those when we can get better protection for free.

Here’s how to freeze your credit:

Annoyingly, you’ll have to freeze your credit separately with each of the three major credit bureaus: Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. That being said, it only took us about 5 minutes per site to set up the freeze.

Below are the links to freeze your credit with each one. At the time of this writing, you will need to set up a free account with each provider in order to do this. Be sure to use a different secure password for each site! We recommend using password management software such as 1Password. Besure to securely store your password and any PINs you set up for the freeze as it will be a PIA if you forget them!

What to have handy/know:

  • Name, Date of Birth social security number

Important notes:

  1. Once you freeze your credit, you will no longer be able to do things like quickly sign up for a store credit card to get the discount.
  2. You might also need to unfreeze your credit if you plan to use a “buy now, pay later” service like  Affirm (we at Bold Vision Financial would say that adding friction to this process is probably a good thing!)
  3. To get a bona fide loan with the freeze in place, you will need to alert the lender and leave time in the process to lift the freeze.

If you have children under 18, you will also want to freeze their credit.

Here’s how to do that:

Unfortunately, this also needs to be done separately for all three credit bureaus. When they turn 18, the freeze is automatically removed and they will need to do the adult process above.

While this is not the most exciting way to spend a half hour, this is definitely a case where an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, so make like Nike and JUST DO IT!