New year, new credit files

My grandmother kept the family papers in a biscuit tin. Birth certificates, a deed to a house nobody had lived in for forty years, my grandfather's discharge, the receipt for a piano. Once a year, on the first of January, she took the tin down, laid everything out on the dining table, and read it. Not because anything had changed. Because, she said, you can't take care of what you don't look at.

I've thought about that tin every January since, usually while listening to someone describe their resolution to "get their credit together." It's the third most common resolution in the country, behind exercise and money in general, and it fails at about the same rate, for the same reason: it starts with a feeling instead of a fact.

So here's the version of the resolution that works. It has one step, it's free, and it's the only one you'll finish by Friday.

Read the file

Not the app. Not the score. The file — the actual report the lender sees, with the account numbers, the addresses, the dates, the inquiries, and the little codes in the payment history that mean something went sideways in March of 2023.

There are three of them, one per nationwide bureau, and as of a change the bureaus made permanent a few years ago you can pull all three free every week at AnnualCreditReport.com. That's the site. Not the one with the ads, not the one your bank links to, not the one that wants a card number "for verification." The one Congress made them build.

Pull all three. Print them if you can; a report on a screen gets skimmed and a report on a table gets read. Then do what my grandmother did: lay them side by side and look.

What you're looking for

Not problems. Not yet. First you're looking for yourself — and this is where January's honest surprise usually lives. Is every address one you've had? Every name variation yours? Every account something you opened? The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau keeps a list of the errors it sees most, and the top of the list isn't late payments. It's identity: accounts that belong to someone with a similar name, addresses you've never used, the same debt listed twice under two collectors.

Then compare the three. The files aren't copies of each other; they're three separate companies' best guesses, fed by lenders who don't always update all three. An account that's closed on one report and open on another is a lead. A balance that differs by more than a payment is a lead. A collection that one bureau says is paid and another says isn't is the lead that costs people mortgages.

Circle what doesn't match. Don't decide anything yet. You're reading, not fixing.

What you're not doing this week

You're not disputing anything. You're not calling anyone. You're not signing up for a monthly service that promises to handle it. The first week of January is for the biscuit tin — for knowing what's there. The fixing has its own order and its own timing, and there's a whole year of articles here about that, starting with what to do when the envelope from the lender is thin.

And a note on the five files you haven't pulled: the three bureaus are not the whole story. Lenders' verification vendors read LexisNexis and Innovis; banks read ChexSystems and Early Warning; your cable company reported you to NCTUE. Those come later in the month, one at a time. Three is enough for this week.

Why the first of the year

Because the file changes slowly and people change fast. Whatever you resolve to do about money this year — a house, a car, a card with a limit that doesn't embarrass you at the register. Starts from what's in those three reports, and most people are planning from a version of themselves that's a year or two out of date. My grandmother didn't read the papers to find problems. She read them so that when she made a decision, she was making it about the life she actually had.

Take the tin down. Read the file. Then we'll talk about the rest.