6 Ways to Protect Yourself from the Equifax Credit Breach

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2. Monitor Your Credit

While the breach happened this past July, Equifax failed to alert the public until 6 weeks later. So, it’s important to monitor your credit to see if you’ve been affected by this leak while you were unaware of it. Having bad credit can affect you in many ways, it’ll land you with poor interest rates on a mortgage or even stop you from taking one out altogether. But, by monitoring your credit, you can tackle problems before they get out of hand. You’re the potential victim of a data breach, so it makes sense for you to use to a credit-monitoring firm to take care of it for you. But if you opt to not pay for this service and guard your credit yourself, note that you’ll need to make weekly if not daily checks, so you can spot any abnormal activity. Additionally, you should monitor your finances too, because credit card numbers were also stolen in the breach.

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