Well, it’s very nearly here. And the fact quarter’s end is coincident with Easter weekend and the beginning of Passover is no excuse for the event to escape your attention.
Stuff happens at the end of each quarter. For me it means collecting some interest from an account that pays quarterly. Probably more important, it is time for me to do my quarterly credit report check. I do this every three months, obtaining a free credit report in turn, on a rotating basis, from each of the four major credit reporting agencies (Experian, TransUnion, Innovis, and Equifax). I purposefully listed Equifax last because they are a bunch of skunks.
Do you have stuff you routinely attend to at the end of each quarter? If so, please feel free to contribute.
Pay interest on my loans, figure out how well my investments did, and make sure my broker’s friendly “not exactly Good til Canceled” orders don’t auto-cancel unless I want them to.
Yes, that is a good, important item. I’m not into stocks so it did not occur to me. But at least quarterly evaluation of overall portfolio performance makes a whole lot of sense.
Are you purposely limiting yourself to doing this once per quarter? You can get all three reports once a month for free. And scores once a week (thread).
I guess I am. Separate out scores, though. I did not mention scores, which are readily available from a variety of sources, at least for me. I check my score fairly often.
But the reports are a nuisance even on a quarterly basis. It is because they go so DARN far back, listing a great many closed accounts which continue to appear even though no longer of importance. I grow tired of reviewing all that stuff, even quarterly.
But a quarterly check works for me, regardless. It imposes a bit of much needed discipline. Better to check quarterly than even less frequently. And quarterly is about how often I can tolerate the annoyance.
They should only go back 10 years since account closure for most accounts, except in cases when accounts weren’t properly reported, or their last reported date was much later than their closing date.
I created a spreadsheet with all the accounts with issuer, visible portion of the account number, opened date, and for closed accounts, date closed and date expected to fall off. I have a few more columns to keep track of accounts that don’t appear on all three reports, plus my own notes about the account so I could identify it easily. At the bottom I have a count of opened and closed accounts for each agency.
This makes it much easier to identify changes in the report.
Quarterly task: Check and enroll for credit cards that participate in rotating quarterly cashback categories. Three that come to mind are US Bank Cash+, Discover It, Chase Freedom.
