The freeze you forgot you placed

I placed a freeze on all three of my files in the autumn of 2019, after a letter from a health insurer told me my information had been "involved in an incident." I did it in an afternoon, wrote the PINs on an index card, put the card in the tin, and did not think about it again for six years.

In February my granddaughter signed a lease in Boston and the landlord wanted a guarantor. I said yes, of course, and the property manager called two days later to say my report "could not be accessed." I told her that was impossible. She was patient with me. She was right.

Jenavieve wrote on the 1st about the freeze and the week before an application, and her advice is correct: lift it at the bureau the requester will pull, a few days before, and put it back after. What she did not write, because she has not yet had six years go by without needing new credit, is that the freeze outlives the reason for it, and that people our age are the ones most likely to have placed one and least likely to remember which bureaus, which PINs, and which drawer.

The FTC's page on the subject says the freeze stays until you lift it and that it is free to place and lift. What it does not say, and I will: it is also free to forget. So here is the ritual I have adopted, and I recommend it to anyone over sixty-five.

Once a year, on a date you will not miss, pull the three reports and check whether a freeze is on each one. The report itself often says so at the top, and if it doesn't, each bureau's website will tell you in under a minute once you are logged in. Write down, on one card, which bureaus are frozen and how to lift each. Put the card where the reports are. Mine is in the tin, with the letters, because that is where I will look.

And before you agree to be anyone's guarantor or co-signer, ask which bureau they pull, and lift that one that day. Jenavieve says Experian is the one most lenders read first, and she is right about mortgages; landlords and utilities in my experience are less predictable, so ask.

Mikhail, who reads over my shoulder, points out that I have now admitted in print to forgetting something for six years. Yes. That is the piece. A freeze is a good tool that punishes the careful, because it is the careful who place it and the careful who then go six years without a reason to think about it.

The principle: anything you set and forget must be written down where you will find it, or it is not set. It is lost.

Check yours this week. If you find one you don't remember, you have just learned something true about your own file, which is the only kind of thing worth learning.