Soon you'll be able to freeze your credit for free
Bottom Line: In the age of cyber insecurity and identity theft millions of Americans have taken steps to literally prevent anyone, themselves included, from being able to obtain new lines of credit. The catch is two-fold. First, if you want access your credit you have to take all of the credit freezes off to be able to do so and secondly it costs you an average of $10 per credit rating agency, $30 total, to put them on and if you take them off you have to pay again to put them back on when you're done. Very soon, that'll no longer be the case.
A bill has passed Congress that will soon be signed into law by President Trump that will remove any fees for placing credit freezes. This is a good time to recap a couple related notes. If you're placing credit freezes on your credit to block potential fraud you need to do so with each of the consumer agencies (Experian, Equifax, TransUnion). While doing so will prevent anyone, yourself included, from being able to obtain a new line of credit it's not a replacement for ID theft protection in my view.
If someone has your ID they can still impersonate you, obtain a license or ID in your name, steal property, etc. ID theft protection will alert you if any of those types of public records changes are attempted as well. So, if you want to be especially diligent have an ID theft protection service that you use to monitor and alert you of any issues that might arise and wait until this law is passed and place credit freezes with the rating agencies if you aren't looking to take out any loans in the near future. And the good thing is with the process being free it doesn't have to be a financial consideration that stops you from doing it if you want to in the future.