I am looking for a credit monitoring service. All I care about is making sure no one has opened any accounts in my name, and none of the companies I deal with has filed any negative reports against me. Also, I am going to be buying a car soon and I would like to know my credit scores.
I was using TrueCredit for a while, and it was okay, but it annoyed me that it was constantly trying to sell me shit. The home page was about 99% “SIGN UP NOW!!! DO IT!!! PROTECT YOUR CREDITZ!!!” and 1% “Existing Customers Login Here”, which pissed me off every time I went there. Always seemed really sleazy. I canceled it about a year ago.
Anyone have a credit monitoring website to recommend?
What’s wrong with just doing the free annual credit report (Annual Credit Report.com - Home Page)? That won’t give you the score but will let you do a snapshot of your accounts so you’ll see if any unexpected accounts have been opened. We usually try to do one of the three every 4ish months. True, it’s not as proactive as the ongoing services.
To get your actual score, you can go to myfico.com. They offer a monitoring service as well but you can sign up for it to get your score, then cancel within something like 2 weeks and it’s free.
The individual sites (Experian etc.) will also sell you your score one-time but beware, at least one of them sells a fake-o score instead of your true FICO.
I use IdentityGuard and am quite happy with it. I receive monthly email notifications if there’s no activity and a la carte notifications if there is activity.
Your best bet is to pull your credit report three times a year(once per agency) for free through AnnualCreditReport.com which was set up to give credit bureaus a cheap way to meet the federal requirement of providing a free report once a year to each person they keep a file on. This doesn’t tell you your scores, but it tells you about inquiries, potentially negative items, and which lines of credit are open in your name. It’s good to check each report against each other, so sometimes you want to get them all at once, but for ongoing monitoring, I pull each one once a year for each agency in a staggered timeframe. So in January I may pull Experian, In May I may pull Equifax, and in October I pull TransUnion. This way I get three updates on my credit in a year for free, from the source instead of a third party.
As for the actual score, I generally go to Fair Issac(the company who calculates the FICO) and get their credit watcher service. I sign up for a trial about once a year or before a major purchase and get three months free, then cancel. They don’t make it super easy to cancel, but if I was in the market for a credit watcher service I think that’s the one I would use. During my trial periods I’ve been happy with the service, but I don’t think it’s worth $15 a month for me. My credit situation is pretty stable at the moment so I don’t lose much sleep over it.
On Preview: Mama Zappa said most of the stuff I was going to say. Darn co-workers interrupting my SDMB time. Anyway, no one has mentioned the stuff on risk-based pricing, so here you go.
There are no reputable ones.
They are all scams, trying to get you to pay them for what you could easily do yourself.
As previous posters explained, pull your credit rating yourself, check it, and dispute any errors. Then take the $150-$200 that saved you, and get yourself a nice treat to compensate you for your work.
LOL! You and I are definitely on the same wavelength :). I didn’t realize you could get 3 months free from Myfico. When I did the check (August, I think), the thing I signed up for was only for 2 weeks before they’d start to bill me. And I was indeed checking to get set for a major purchase (well, refi - was thinking of refinancing our house and wanted to make sure there’d be no surprises.
Interestingly, when I applied for the refi, our credit union sent us copies of the credit scores from all 3 agencies, for both of us. They varied substantially - 40ish points from the lowest to the highest. We were well into the range that qualified for their best loans, but the lowest for one of us was below that magic “760” score so it might have been an issue with another lender.
It’s entirely possible they changed the trial period for the FICO ScoreWatch service. I haven’t abused their free trial in a couple of years. In fact the second and third times I did it I shook my head and said “they really let people sign up for multiple trials?” I wasn’t complaining, but more disbelieving.
I think it will be very interesting soon to see what kind of shakeout the increased publication of these kinds of behind the scenes scores and reports brings. The credit bureaus operated for decades before “a credit report” became household knowledge. I think the leveling of the playing field with regards to the score will make a difference in things like predatory loans. Well, I’m hopeful at least.