The Three Keys to Protecting Credit Scores after the Death of a Spouse

Dealing with economic concerns following the loss of a husband or wife will inevitably be difficult. Faced with overwhelming sorrow, the spouse left behind to take care of the household bills will have sufficient trouble just keeping up with the monetary needs of the domestic budget beyond the greater worries about credit scores over the forthcoming days. Hard enough just to wrangle with the intricacies of credit bureaus and FICO scores during the best of times, but crafting a new credit persona absent the help of a life partner could seem unimaginably nerve wracking. Still, as you’ll likely hear too often in the days after your spouse has passed away, life truly must go on, and there are some crucial actions that must be taken during this time of mourning.

Protecting the identity of the deceased, though this may well appear to be the least of the family’s worries, has actually a newfound importance since scavengers of financial detritus and credit offerings will immediately leap upon death notices to further their malevolent plans. Obituary notices, sadly enough, have been the entrance point toward criminal actions for a new breed of credit scavengers, and the surviving spouse must do what they can to shield their husband or wife’s financial legacy from thievery.

For so many spouses surviving the death of the family bread winner, the trick will be not just preventing household accounts from falling into the hands of financial predators but also establishing a new credit portfolio essentially from scratch. So many older men and women realize only too late that they had left the details of the domestic budget to their partners and failed to earn any proper credit history of their own.

There are a number of different acts that have to be initiated from virtually the morning after the funeral proceedings have finished, and, below, we’ve singled out some of the most important steps each surviving spouse should follow for the security – and, in some cases, the origination – of the family credit rating.

1.) Even during the days of mourning just after the death of a loved one, the spouse (or whomever has been put in charge of the household affairs) must take the initiative to contact the credit reporting agencies in popular usage around the United States of America: Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion. Ideally, this will be a formal request with some paper trail for protection of assets in the event of identity theft.

2.) As a vital action, every credit card and revolving debt account must be individually contacted whether through telephone, internet, or the old fashioned postal system. Once again, however, it’s in the best interest of all involved that there be some documentation of the notification, meaning that a traditional typed and mailed piece of correspondence may be most suitable (for that matter, many of the creditors shall demand that the official death certificate be Xeroxed).

3.) For any credit lines jointly held by both spouses, there still needs to be the same attention paid to alerting the lender representatives about the tragic circumstances, but, unfortunately, in most cases, the surviving wife or husband will still have to make payments from then on until the account is fully satisfied. Generally, at the time that the credit card company changes the formal record of obligation, the newly responsibly party could ask for the spending limit and interest rates to be re-priced, but, with lessened income available, the resulting terms could well be worse than they were originally.