Everyone with little children / grand children should watch this

[CobraEd]

This is long but very well done and vital to little children. At the end they tell you how to check on your kids status.

My whole family has LifeLock which fully prevents this. (No, I have no affiliation with LifeLock.)

msnbc.com Video Player


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You can put a freeze on your credit at the three major credit reporting agencies (at no charge to you in some states per state law, and a nominal charge in others). I did this a year or so ago for myself, my wife, my widowed mom, and tried to for my kids. Nothing came up for my kids at the time, I guess because they were minors. I am not sure. My oldest is 18 now so I should probably try again.

To my knowledge, no one can take out credit against your identity because the lender can't check credit on you at the three credit reporting agencies when it is frozen.

Last year when we refinanced the house, my mortgage lender called me and had to ask me to temporarily unfreeze our credit ( the wife and I) so they could run the routine credit check prior to the new loan. Works as advertised. Little or no cost depending on where you live.

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The only caveat to this is that as of today both my kids appear to be "ghosts", as we used to say in the car business. Neither of the three major credit reporting agencies recognize my kids when I try to run the annual free credit report that is available by law once a year at annualcreditreport.com. So I'm not sure how to freeze their credit if they don't even have an active credit file with Transunion, Experian or Equifax. I'll have to do some more homework on this. Ideas welcome.