If you live in the US, one additional thing you need to take care of is your credit score. Your credit score plays a great role in deciding the price of different services and interest rates. Further more, a bad credit score reduces your chances of getting apartments in big cities. This means that you need to be aware of your credit status when making major decisions. Planning to buy a new car? Or thinking about moving to a new city? Make sure to check your credit score before you go ahead with your plan. If you have not-so-good credit score at this moment, it is in your best interest to wait little longer and take necessary measures to repair your credit score.

Credit scores are maintained by three different bureaus and you do not have direct access to the scores. However, US government mandates that everyone should be provided with their credit file once a year without any charge. This way everyone can monitor their credit file and ensure that their credit file doesnot have any inaccurate entries.

The three credit bureaus have come together with this web-site to provide access to the credit files. From this website, you can obtain a free copy of your credit file every year. Unlike many other sites where you get charged for services that are said to be free, being mandated by the government, this site has no such catch.

Please remember that you can access your credit file for free only once a year (however, if your credit application was rejected, you can request free credit report within 30 days). If you need more detailed credit monitoring or if you want to monitor your credit score regularly, there are several tools available in the market for some basic fee. I will come up with another post on these tools some time later.