How often should I check my credit reports?

If you are really worried about your credit, you can sign up for a credit monitoring service that will basically check your reports constantly. If you don't want to pay anything, you can order free credit reports from annualcreditreport.com. The site will allow you to order one copy of your credit report from each credit bureau every 12 months. If you stagger this by 4 months by, for example, ordering your Equifax report in January, your Experian report in May, and your TransUnion report in August, then you are basically able to check for new developments 4 times a year. It's not as immediate as monitoring, but it's a good minimum effort for making sure your identity hasn't been stolen.