I just got my free credit report from one of the major bureaus. I got a great idea from another site (I don't recall where) that you can actually get a credit report three times a year by staggering your requests to the various companies. So I got one yesterday, and I'll get another in four months, and so on.
I'm happy to report that my record appears to be clean. Nobody seems to have opened up accounts or taken out loans in my name, so it all looks good. On top of that, I have zero late payments or other negative information. It irritates me that Hertz checked my credit report when I rented a car during a job interview in Seattle a year and a half ago, but that's what happens when you rent a car.
The only negative thing is my debt to available credit ratio. My mortgage* and student loans are always going to be at 100% and, though I've been paying them down, my credit cards are fairly high. But because my mortgage and student loans take up such a high proportion of my overall debt, they really skew my total debt to credit ratio. I'm pretty sure, however, that the distribution is taken into account. Most people's highest debt is a mortgage, and a lot of people have student loans, so it wouldn't make an overall sense to put too much stock in this measure without accounting for the kind of debt.
Overall, the report is as good as I can hope for given how much I owe. I'd better get on that. We're getting our state annual increases in a month, so the majority is going toward my debt payment allocation. I'd put it all in that direction, but I also want to step up saving so that I can easily pay for a few end of the year expenses, like going to New Orleans in December. It's going to feel so good to pay for that with money that I've saved rather than with credit.
* I'm perfectly aware that a mortgage is a property interest in land, while the promissory note represents my promise to pay the debt, but I'll just use "mortgage" because it's easier.
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